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A LAYMAN'S APOLOGY 



GILBERT M.TUCKER 






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Class -B"K I 2 5 

Book :._J 

Copyright N° 



COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT. 



A 
LAYMAN'S APOLOGY 



BY 

GILBERT M. TUCKER 




RICHARD G. BADGER 
THE GORHAM PRESS 
BOSTON 



Copyright, 1913, by Gilbert M. Tucker 



All Rights Reserved 

•T?5 



The Gorham Press, Boston, U. S. A. 



P}ll 



'CI.A353733 



CONTENTS 

PAGE 

Foreword 3 

I 

The Argument from Law n 

II 

A Book Success that Needs Explaining . 47 

III 
Orthodoxy and Nature 73 

IV 

Christianity and Other Religions . . .115 



FOREWORD 

THE writer of the following essays, though 
venturing to deal with questions involving 
both science and religion, is neither a savant nor 
a theologian, but emphatically a layman in both 
departments of study, laying no claim to author- 
ity as an expounder of either, and only endeavor- 
ing to correlate certain universally accepted 
truths that speak for themselves, and deduce 
from them fheir sometimes overlooked but 
strictly logical consequences. Conceiving that 
man's relations to his maker, if he has a maker, 
are of all objects of thought the most vitally 
important, the writer has sought to learn, from 
the conclusions of science and the teachings of 
alleged divine revelation, some of the ultimate 
words that each would speak to the attentive 
mind in regard to our origin and our duty; and 
has then endeavored to compare the teachings 
of the one with those of the other, by no means 

3 



4 A LAYMAN'S APOLOGY 

laboriously to " reconcile " them, Procrustes- 
fashion or otherwise, but honestly to ascertain 
how far, if at all, they agree. This is of course 
the same thing as inquiring whether the alleged 
divine revelation can reasonably be accepted as 
such; for the settled conclusions of science (to 
be sharply distinguished from the guesses and 
assumptions of scientific men) no one who un- 
derstands them can help but receive for truth, 
whatever may be his desire ; and if any doctrine 
purporting to be divinely inspired is really at 
war with these conclusions, no sincere thinker 
can do otherwise than reject it. By " alleged 
divine revelation," are understood the funda- 
mental doctrines of the Christian faith. Con- 
sidering that Christianity invariably triumphs 
over all her competitors when brought into 
equal combat, so that it is hardly to be conceived 
as possible that a sane man, rejecting the evi- 
dence that Christianity is from the Creator, 
could accept any other religion as divine, it is 
thought fair to take Christianity as the repre- 
sentative of all alleged divine revelations, and 
to presume that if her claims will not bear the 



FOREWORD 5 

scrutiny of scientific examination, still less will 
those of her rivals. 

The inquiry restricts itself therefore to the 
question whether the Christian faith can be rea- 
sonably accepted as fundamentally sound. 
Those who answer in the negative, at the pres- 
ent day at least, commonly do so, the writer 
thinks, on the ground that the teachings of the 
Bible are inconsistent with those of science. 
This science may be physical or moral. It may 
be argued that natural events do not occur as 
it is supposed that believers in Christianity are 
bound to maintain that they do; or it may be 
argued that the character of the Christian God, 
and his alleged dealings with his creatures, are 
irreconcilably repugnant to our conceptions of 
the highest goodness, and even of ordinary jus- 
tice. If either opinion is well founded, Chris- 
tianity is sure to be finally relegated to the 
limbo now tenanted by the forgotten super- 
stitions of antiquity, and we might as well send 
it there immediately and be done with it. In 
fact we ought to send it there immediately, and 
rid mankind once for all of its erroneous teach- 



6 A LAYMAN'S APOLOGY 

ings and the burdens that it imposes. A faith 
that is based on falsehood, and that makes evil 
good and good evil, will surely on the whole 
work mischief, even though it embody, as prob- 
ably all faiths embody, many elements of vital 
and important truth. These jewels, if there 
are such, will surely survive, and be the better 
appreciated in proportion as we brush away the 
rubbish that obscures their luster. If, how- 
ever, Christianity is really from God, and the 
most serious objections to accepting its incul- 
cations as divinely sanctioned arise from mis- 
conception or from a one-sided view that 
neglects essential features of the question, it is 
well to try to clarify the matter as far as one 
may; and these essays are intended as a contri- 
bution to that end, though certainly very far 
from constituting anything like a treatise on 
what are called the " Evidences of Chris- 
tianity." The word " Apology " is used in the 
title in the sense defined by the Encyclopaedic 
Dictionary — "Vindication, used specially of 
the defense of Christianity against opposers and 
calumniators," or (better perhaps for present 



FOREWORD 7 

purposes, which are constructive rather than 
polemical), as in the Standard Dictionary — 
"Apology — A justification of belief.'' 



A LAYMAN'S APOLOGY 



THE ARGUMENT FROM LAW 

IN his noted address before the American 
Association for the Advancement of Science, 
at St. Louis, Prof. Newcomb divided into three 
general periods the development to its present 
condition of man's explanation of the move- 
ments that he observes in the physical universe. 
In the first place, men notice a distinction be- 
tween such of these operations as " are deter- 
mined by knowable antecedent conditions, and 
go on with that blind disregard of consequences 
which they call law," and " certain other oper- 
ations which they are unable thus to trace to the 
operation of law." Secondly, they proceed to 
" attribute this latter class to invisible anthropo- 
morphic intelligences, having the power to bring 
about changes in nature, and having certain 
objects in view." But, thirdly, " as knowledge 
advances, one after another of these operations 
are found to be really determined by law, the 



12 A LAYMAN'S APOLOGY 

only difficulty being that the law was before 
unknown or not comprehended, or that the cir- 
cumstances which determined its action were 
obscure or complex." 

Substantially an identical thought is conveyed 
also by the next president's address before the 
same society — Prof. Marsh's, at Saratoga. 
" A superstitious age, when every natural event 
is referred to a supernatural cause," is spoken 
of as preceding " freedom of thought " and 
"definite knowledge," and the speaker adds: 
" If I may venture to characterize the present 
period in all departments of science, its main 
feature would be a belief in universal laws." 

Years before the delivery of either of these 
discourses, Prof. Tyndall had summed up the 
" vast alterations " which modern physical 
science has produced " in the popular concep- 
tion of the origin, rule, and governance of 
natural things," in this result: "One by one 
natural phenomena have been associated with 
their proximate causes; and the idea of direct 
personal volition mixing itself in the economy 
of nature is retreating more and more." 



THE ARGUMENT FROM LAW 13 

The general correctness of these statements 
and others like them, many of which are cur- 
rent — so far, at least, as they refer to the 
gradual abandonment of that superficial con- 
ception of the universe which imagined it a sort 
of self-actuating machine, the operations of 
which were liable to occasional interruption or 
variation by the interposition of external 
agencies — will hardly be disputed by any 
school of thinkers; a settled conviction of the 
uniformity of natural law is doubtless estab- 
lished, or fast establishing itself, in most en- 
lightened minds, beyond danger of overthrow. 

Nor is it open to question either, quoting the 
English savant again, that " many of us fear 
this tendency." Leading expounders of physi- 
cal science, indeed, have often disclaimed the 
intention of furnishing ammunition for the 
cause of positive atheism; and there are prob- 
ably few who would take issue with Prof. New- 
comb's remark, in another part of the address 
already referred to, that " the doctrine that an 
intelligent cause lies behind the whole universe 
of phenomena, is of a class which science has 



i 4 A LAYMAN'S APOLOGY 

no occasion whatever to dispute." At the same 
time, there is unquestionably an uneasy feeling 
in many minds in regard to the rapid extension 
of the domain of what may be termed physical 
necessity — an apprehension, more or less dis- 
tinctly formed, that mankind is in danger, not 
only of enlarging too widely the limits of the 
semi-fatalism which has taken possession of an 
important part of the realm of nature, but also 
of losing, by an indirect but not unnatural infer- 
ence, its belief in a personal creator. To in- 
quire whether such an inference is logical from 
the established facts, or rather to offer some 
considerations in partial reply to the broader 
question, " What inference in regard to the 
nature of the first cause ought we to draw from 
the admitted truth that physical laws appear 
to operate at present 1 with unvarying exact- 

1 It cannot have escaped the notice of any reader of the 
materialistic-scientific literature of our day that many apos- 
tles of that way of thinking find it occasionally useful to 
suppose that phenomena may sometimes occur which are not 
produced by the action of physical laws as we know them. 
Thus Huxley, while stating clearly his belief that man has 
never discovered any sort of life not descended from ante- 
cedent life, was yet of opinion that if he could look 



THE ARGUMENT FROM LAW 15 

ness wherever there is a physical phenome- 
non? " — is the purpose of this paper. 

The preliminary question, whether the first 
cause must not of necessity be to us unknowable, 
may for present purposes be briefly disposed of. 
In its absolute essence, no doubt it must be ; but 
then, the personality of our most intimate 
friends is also, in a certain sense, something 
quite beyond the grasp of our thinking. At 
the same time, we can form a very clear idea 
of a man's bodily prowess, and mental, emo- 
tional and moral attributes, by observing what 
he does. Or, to keep within the purview of 
physical science, we can readily acquire all the 
information we want about the properties of 
any mass of matter that we have sufficient op- 
portunity to examine, although the indefinable 
(but indispensable) substratum in which these 

back to the remote period of the earth's infancy, he would 
" be a witness of the evolution of living protoplasm from 
not-living matter." This is the same as to say that he at 
least doubted whether our present physical laws acted just 
as they do now, while the earth was forming. Hence we 
must speak of physical laws as only appearing to operate 
at present universally, for this is all that is invariably 
claimed for them. 



1 6 A LAYMAN'S APOLOGY 

qualities inhere, is something of which we can 
form no conception whatever. We understand 
the properties of electricity, and make daily use 
of the knowledge, without forming the slightest 
mental picture of electricity itself. In the same 
manner it may be reasonably supposed that 
while the actual mode of being of the primal 
cause of all phenomena is a subject which it 
were vain for the human imagination to at- 
tempt to depict, yet we can probably learn 
something of the attributes of that cause, by 
considering the method and results of its oper- 
ations; and to learn these attributes is all that 
need be desired, since it is only by attributes that 
we know or can know anything or anybody. 
Taking for granted, then, all that science can 
tell us about the course of nature and its regu- 
larity, let us inquire what must be the attributes 
of the impelling cause by which this regularity 
was established and is maintained. 



THE ARGUMENT FROM LAW 17 



If there is to be perceived, in the physical 
universe as we know it, a law more prominent 
than the rest for its apparent exemption from 
all exception or irregularity, it is of course the 
law of gravitation. What then exactly do we 
mean by these words, " the law of gravita- 
tion " ? Primarily, no doubt, this : That all 
particles of matter free to move do move 
toward each other at a rate of speed conditioned 
by the position of every particle in the universe ; 
and that all such particles as cannot move, exert 
upon the obstacle a proportionate pressure. 
Strictly speaking, perhaps, the use of the word 
" law," as applied to the statement of this truth, 
may be held to imply a belief quite opposed to 
the leading tenets of popular materialism. 
That is to say, adopting the old apothegm, the 
admitted existence of a law necessarily involves 
the admitted existence, now or in the past, of 
a law-giver. As John Stuart Mill puts it: 
" The expression ' law of nature ' is generally 
employed by scientific men with a sort of tacit 



1 8 A LAYMAN'S APOLOGY 

reference to the original sense of the word, 
namely, the expression of the will of a superior " 
— which is quite in harmony with Huxley's 
postulate : " I take it that all will admit there 
is definite government of this universe." This, 
however, is disputed; we are told that a " law " 
in nature is a law quite sui generis, the term only 
indicating, in physical science, the statement of 
an observed mode of action, and not a rule for 
action. Nevertheless " it is desirable to re- 
member," as Huxley elsewhere remarks, " that 
the laws of nature are not the causes of the 
order of nature." Laws are not forces; and 
as we have good authority for the statement 
that " without a force underlying all motion 
and antecedent to it, no rational conception of 
dynamics is possible," x and Tyndall adds that 
" the truly scientific intellect never can attain 
rest until it reaches the forces by which the ob- 
served succession is produced," it follows that 
such an intellect will never be satisfied with the 
mere statement, however elaborately expressed, 
that matter gravitates, and gravitates in a cer- 

1 Smithsonian Report, 1879, p. 485. 



THE ARGUMENT FROM LAW 19 

tain way. Every event must have its cause, 
every motion its impelling force; and we must 
therefore amplify our explication of the law, 
if it is fully to express the real conviction, so as 
to include the assertion that there is ever pres- 
ent a power which produces the motion or 
pressure that is observed wherever there is a 
heavy body. 

Just here, in the interest of clear thinking, 
one must beware of that extremely crude, not 
to say childish, view of the power under con- 
sideration, which conceives of something like 
an infinite number of elastic cords uniting all 
parts of the universe and dragging them to- 
gether — a view which is aided and abetted by 
the convenient but not entirely satisfactory 
term, " the attraction of gravitation." Let it 
be distinctly seen that the power which makes 
bodies fall must be pictured in the mind as 
operating strictly by pushing and not by pulling. 
The distinction is more important than it may 
appear; for if it be overlooked, there will be 
danger of overlooking at the same time the 
truth enunciated by Prof. Carpenter, that 



20 A LAYMAN'S APOLOGY 

" ponderosity cannot be considered an essential 
property of matter," like extension and im- 
penetrability; and thus of failing to notice that 
the phenomena of falling bodies absolutely re- 
quire for their explanation the assignment of 
an external cause. 

That gravitation cannot be thought to act by 
pulling, is evident from two considerations. 
One is, that to suppose that an atom really at- 
tracts another, is to imagine that it can exert 
a direct physical force at a distance from its 
own substance, even should mere vacuum inter- 
vene — a conception which, fully developed and 
understood, runs directly counter to our whole 
system of natural philosophy, if not to the very 
principles on which that system is built up. 
"Modern physicists" — to borrow Balfour 
Stewart's epigrammatic phrase — " tell us that 
matter cannot act where it is not." The so- 
called " attractions " of magnetism and elec- 
tricity, so far from furnishing even doubtful 
instances of the exertion of such distant power, 
illustrate every thinker's disbelief in it, for all 
investigators have felt bound to assume the 



THE ARGUMENT FROM LAW 21 

existence of some " fluid " or indescribable ex- 
ternal cause for the motions by which these 
" attractions " are exemplified; no one can bring 
his mind really to believe that the steel itself of 
the magnet actually draws toward itself the 
iron of the armature, or plays any other part 
than supplying one of the conditions essential 
for the action of the occult force that we call 
magnetism. And secondly (though this is only 
the practical application of the same theoreti- 
cal idea), let it be remembered that every 
demonstrable pull depends for its existence upon 
cohesion, adhesion, or friction — all which 
properties of matter require contact for their 
appearance; and therefore gravitation, not re- 
quiring contact, cannot be a real pull. To illus- 
trate: You raise a bucket from a well by pull- 
ing, and there is one point between your hand 
and the bucket where there is no necessary fric- 
tion, no adhesion, and no cohesion — the point 
of contact, namely, between the rope and the 
bail; but at this point a portion of the rope must 
be below a portion of the bail, and impart the 
lifting force by direct and simple pushing. So 



22 A LAYMAN'S APOLOGY 

it is with all pulls of whatever name or nature ; 
strike out friction, cohesion and adhesion, and 
if the action of the pull remains at all, it will 
have been metamorphosed into a push and 
nothing else; force always, so far as man can 
discover, emanates from its source, never flows 
toward it. 

Whatever, therefore, may be imagined as 
possible in regard to the real objective attrac- 
tion of gravitation — which is something that 
quite transcends our powers of conception, and 
lies entirely outside the domains of both science 
and philosophy — it remains certain that the 
law of gravitation (a purely subjective matter, 
as are all physical laws) must be held in the 
mind, when held clearly, in about the following 
form: 

There is in the universe a power which tends 
to push each atom toward its fellows, at a rate 
of speed conditioned by the position of every 
other atom. 

Consider now for a moment, in order to 
gather all the light that purely physical science 
can give us in relation to the attributes of this 



THE ARGUMENT FROM LAW 23 

demonstrated power, the full meaning of the 
words, " conditioned by the position of every 
other atom." The falling of an acorn from 
the bough, we are told, depends for its speed, 
roughly speaking, upon the mass of the earth 
and the height of the tree. But the acorn is 
made up of myriads of molecules, tens of 
myriads of atoms; and what the acorn is to 
the smallest of them all, that, or something 
like that, is the earth to the acorn. Yet had 
there been one more atom or one less in the 
earth, the speed of the fall had been by a cer- 
tain difference increased or diminished. Not 
only so, but every atom in the moon affects 
the result, every atom in the sun, in the most 
distant planet, the smallest satellite, the faintest 
star, the dimmest mist of a nebula. Moreover, 
the density of the air at the time and place of 
the fall, and its condition as moist or dry, must 
make a difference; and so must the direction 
and force of any wind, however gentle, that 
may be moving; the structure of the acorn as 
compact or porous; its shape, and even the 
nature of its surface, for the smoother this is, 



24 A LAYMAN'S APOLOGY 

the less will be the friction of the air, and there- 
fore the more rapid the descent. 

Now the power that drives the acorn toward 
the ground takes into consideration — so mod- 
ern science teaches — all these circumstances 
and an infinity of others; assigns to each, with 
unerring precision, its exact mathematical value, 
and then combines these values, a task com- 
pared with which the solution of all the equa- 
tions since Euclid were less than the trifle 
of a moment. The stupendous problem is in- 
stantly worked out, and the result attained. At 
least, science surely tells us that the acorn moves 
precisely as if its rate of speed had been thus 
calculated; and there seems to be no escape 
from the deduction that the calculation has 
actually been made, except by embracing one of 
three manifest errors — that the motion has no 
cause, which is contrary to an axiom; that it is 
caused by the intrinsic properties of the acorn, 
which is contrary to the principle of inertia ; or 
that it is caused by the rest of the universe, 
which is a mere juggle of words, sufficiently 



THE ARGUMENT FROM LAW 25 

answered by the simple thought that the rest of 
the universe, so far from acting as the origi- 
nator of the movement, is itself, to an infinitesi- 
mal degree, a participant in it. Were the 
action irregular, were the movements of the 
planets (to pass from a very humble to a very 
grand illustration of the unvarying accuracy of 
the force of gravitation) spasmodic and in- 
capable of reduction to the rules of arithmetic, 
no power of calculation, no comprehension of 
mathematical principles, perhaps no clear intel- 
ligence, could be confidently attributed to the 
power that guides them. As it is, what clearer 
evidence can be imagined than these movements 
furnish, that that power understands arith 
metic? And taking into view the whole field 
how can we better describe the power that re 
veals itself in every falling body than to call it 
first and manifestly (like all powers), imma 
terial; second, omnipresent, as acting every 
where at the same time; third, practically om 
nipotent, as controlling the largest masses that 
we know of; fourth, omniscient, as taking into 



26 A LAYMAN'S APOLOGY 

consideration what may fairly be called an 
infinity of conditions; and fifth, intelligent, as 
solving mathematical problems of such intricacy 
as utterly transcends the scope of any human 
calculus ? This conclusion plainly yields, on the 
one hand, no encouragement to the anthropo- 
morphic fancies of the heathen; how much 
better, on the other, does it harmonize with the 
atheism or agnosticism of the materialist? 

A similar analysis, yielding substantially the 
same result, might readily be applied to the 
other laws of inorganic matter. The power 
that turns the magnetized needle toward the 
pole; the power that expands, with almost ir- 
resistible force, a mass of freezing water at the 
instant of congelation; the power that unites 
and compresses nineteen hundred volumes of 
gases into a single volume of the solid sal- 
ammoniac — each of these, so far as appears, 
must be described in essentially the same terms 
as the power that drives the avalanche down 
the mountain. And then, this further step can 
hardly be avoided: 



THE ARGUMENT FROM LAW 27 

II 

Gravitation has been spoken of as only prac- 
tically omnipotent, and reference has been made 
to particles of matter which cannot move, 
though urged to do so by its influence. For 
instance, the power that holds Jupiter in its 
orbit, deflecting the enormous mass of the 
planet at every instant from the tangent on 
which its momentum would otherwise hurl it 
out into space, this stupendous power, when 
exerting itself on acorns hanging on the tree, 
is for a long time neutralized by the strength 
of the slender twigs that hold them; cohesion 
successfully resists gravitation. That is to say, 
the moment that two laws of nature conflict, 
we perceive the establishment of a certain har- 
mony between them; and a new result is pro- 
duced, always precisely the same under the 
same conditions. For an acorn of the same 
weight, and suspended at the same height, the 
strain on the twig is always identical ; there must 
be exactly so much strength, in order to prevent 
the motion. There is nothing like capricious- 



28 A LAYMAN'S APOLOGY 

ness or uncertainty in any case of conflict. If 
an electromagnet will sustain an ounce of iron 
on one day, it will always sustain it, as often as 
the exact conditions are reproduced; we do not 
sometimes see gravitation victorious and some- 
times magnetic attraction, circumstances being 
precisely equal. Hence, bearing in mind the 
tremendous energy of these natural forces, it 
would seem necessarily to follow that their 
causes are really only a single cause; that they 
are, one and all, the outflow or a single will, 
acting consistently with itself in every case, 
though appearing in a million diverse manifes- 
tations. Camille Flammarion put it this way, 
summing up on his seventieth birthday the 
gleanings of a long life devoted to the study 
of the universe and its laws: "Everything 
forms an immense unity, the unity of a force 
that, however unknowable, is intelligent." 

Ill 

Modern scientific speculation, however, sug- 
gests a certain objection to the phrase employed 
above, " the laws of inorganic matter." 



THE ARGUMENT FROM LAW 29 

Lamarck, a century ago, had already reached 
the conclusion that there is no essential differ- 
ence between animate and inanimate substance ; 
all nature, he thought, is a single world of con- 
nected phenomena, and the same causes which 
form and transform inanimate natural bodies 
are alone those which are at work in animate 
nature. In this opinion — received with con- 
siderable dissent at first, as is not surprising — 
the materialistic thinkers of the present day 
most fully concur. Huxley, long before his 
death, had grown out of the conception he 
formerly held " of the differences between liv- 
ing and not-living bodies"; " in the endless 
variation of the forms assumed by living 
beings," he saw in his later years " nothing but 
the natural product of the forces originally 
possessed by the substance of the universe." 
Tyndall scoffed at " vitality " as a special agent, 
and was of opinion that " the philosophy of the 
present day negatives the supposition that the 
forces of organic matter are different in kind 
from those of inorganic." Herbert Spencer 
firmly believed " that life under all its forms 



3 o A LAYMAN'S APOLOGY 

has arisen by an unbroken evolution, and 
through the instrumentality of what are called 
natural causes." Maudsley assures us that 
" few if any will now be found to deny that 
every phenomenon of mind is the result of some 
change in the nervous elements of the brain." 
And Haeckel has more recently expressed the 
same doctrine in a highly concrete form: " The 
magnet attracting iron filings; powder explod- 
ing; steam driving the locomotive, work just 
as does the sensitive mimosa, when it folds its 
leaves at a touch — as does the amphioxus, 
when it buries itself in the sand — as does man, 
when he thinks." That is to say, in brief, all 
phenomena are physical phenomena and nothing 
more, and are produced by the action of physi- 
cal forces alone. 

Accepting these deliverances with as few 
mental grimaces as one may; shutting one's 
eyes to the remarkable transformation, to say 
the least of it, which the action of mechanical 
and chemical forces undergoes when operating 
in a living body, building up, apparently under 
the control of a stronger power, the structure 



THE ARGUMENT FROM LAW 31 

that they instantly begin to break down at the 
occurrence of death; shutting one's eyes, too, 
to the great facts of descent and nutrition, which 
appear to the ordinary observer to separate so 
sharply the vegetable from the mineral; and to 
the greater fact of consciousness, which seems 
still more sharply to distinguish the animal from 
all other orders of creation (it being con- 
fessedly difficult to conceive this phenomenon 
as produced by the action of purely physical 
forces in a mass of matter, however constituted, 
where there has been no preceding life) — 
shutting one's eyes to these objections, this thing 
is certain : If all vital action is produced by the 
same forces, acting under the same laws, as 
produce what we commonly call physical action, 
then surely the same power that drives the 
myriad wheels of that division of nature with 
which the physical sciences deal, must be also 
the cause (or why not say, the Creator?) of 
vegetable and animal life in all its diversified 
manifestations. 

What light, then, is shed by these manifes- 
tations, upon the attributes of the first cause? 



32 A LAYMAN'S APOLOGY 

IV 

When a mass of transformed protoplasm 
that we call a rose is brought into certain re- 
lations with another mass of transformed 
protoplasm that we call an intelligent man, cer- 
tain phenomena may be observed to take place 
in the second of these masses. Adopting for 
convenience the vulgar phraseology, which in 
this case at least is decidedly more compendious 
than a strictly scientific statement would be, we 
say that the man sees the rose, and inhales its 
fragrance. Be it so that these operations are 
purely physical; that the power of sense-percep- 
tion, as well as the complex organs that con- 
dition its exercise, is the mere product of the 
action of light and other appropriate stimuli 
upon inert matter; but unless the stream can 
rise higher than its source, it can hardly be 
doubted that the impeller and manager of these 
stimuli, beside possessing that intelligence 
which is revealed in the operation of the physi- 
cal forces on inorganic substance, must have 
also in his nature something akin to the per- 



THE ARGUMENT FROM LAW 33 

ceptive powers that he has developed in the 
products of his skill. To suppose the, con- 
trary, would be like imagining that a man might 
construct an automaton endowed not only with 
the same senses as himself, but with others be- 
side, of whose nature the contriver of the ap- 
paratus can form no conception. Let it be 
remembered, too, that senses inconceivable to 
us can be imagined as possible; that the material 
universe may have many more aspects than the 
five that we know of; and hence that it is at 
least not improbable that the senses, so to 
speak, of the first cause are many times more 
in number, as well as more powerful, more deli- 
cate, and more accurate, than ours. 

V 

The phenomenon of perceiving the rose, 
moreover, is quickly followed by another — the 
appearance of a feeling, admiration, in the man. 
With the nature and exact genesis of this feel- 
ing, we are not at present concerned. Give 
what account of its being one may, everybody 
knows that it exists; and the point to note is 



34 A LAYMAN'S APOLOGY 

that, whatever emotion may be, the First Cause 
must possess the capacity for it; else he surely 
could not develop it by the action of the laws 
through which he works. That is to say, he 
not only knows, and can perceive, but he feels, 
as well. And when one reflects upon the depth 
of meaning that the word emotion covers; or, 
to restrict the field of view and thus deepen the 
impression, when one weighs thoughtfully the 
words love, hate, anger, fear, contempt, grati- 
tude, and remembers how far the most intense 
development of any passion within human ex- 
perience falls short of what may easily be 
imagined as possible with a more exalted emo- 
tional constitution, it speedily comes to be per- 
ceived that we go not as far in our induction 
as the phenomena plainly warrant, if we fail to 
assign to the first cause of these phenomena a 
capacity for the exercise of what are generally 
considered spiritual faculties, unspeakably ex- 
celling any such capacity that we possess, in 
proportion perhaps to the difference between 
man's puny muscular strength and the amazing 
physical energy that reveals itself in the move- 



THE ARGUMENT FROM LAW 35 

ments of the stellar systems. Let it be granted 
in the fullest sense that man and all his facul- 
ties, of whatever name or kind, have been de- 
veloped by the action of purely physical force 
on utterly inert matter, precisely as a crystal is 
built up in a solution of alum; and the inference 
is irresistible that the originator of these forces, 
the weaver who has so arranged their innumer- 
able strands as to produce at last the infinitely 
diversified web of human feeling, must himself 
possess at least the capacity for any emotion 
that his creatures can know. 

VI 

There are phenomena, however, higher in 
rank than those of the emotions. Beyond the 
realm of aesthetics, in the widest sense of that 
term, lies the domain of ethics. As much more 
complicated as is a feeling than a thought, so 
much more complicated is the sense of duty, the 
appreciation of the word ought, than a feeling. 
This highest class of phenomena, also, like 
those of the order next below them, are now 
traced back to their ultimate source in the action 



36 A LAYMAN'S APOLOGY 

of physical force ; and we need not dispute the 
pedigree. Let the " genesis of the conscience " 
be accepted exactly as it is described by the 
most "advanced" philosophers; let it be 
granted that the restraining power which kept 
Casabianca at his post of duty while the ship 
burned, and the musicians playing on the deck 
of the Titanic till the waves engulfed them; and 
the magnificent courage that nerved Woodland, 
in the Hudson River tunnel, to order the break- 
ing of the deadeyes in the air-lock, certain to 
bring instant suffocation upon himself while 
giving a chance for the escape of his subordi- 
nates — were simply the resultants of purely 
physical force, in exactly the same sense as is 
the flight of a cannon-ball the consequence of 
the explosion of the powder; and no conclusion 
can be more certain than this: That the im- 
peller of physical force, the being who works 
out by its operation such results as these, must 
himself possess the capacity for the same 
actions or for others of still higher grandeur. 
That is to say, the Power that has produced the 
moral sensibility of mankind, no matter by what 



THE ARGUMENT FROM LAW 37 

means, and no matter what that sensibility is, 
must himself feel the distinction between noble 
deeds and base, between good and evil. He 
must be endowed, not only with intellectual and 
aesthetic faculties, but with the highest of all, a 
moral nature. 

VII 

A single point remains for consideration. 
What sort of a moral nature is it that the 
First Cause possesses? What kind of passions 
sway his will? Are his purposes toward the 
sentient products of the operation of his laws, 
benevolent or the reverse? There is any quan- 
tity of indisputable evil in the world. Physical 
pain is almost co-extensive with the capacity for 
suffering it; tastes are daily offended, feelings 
are wounded, the sense of equity is shocked, just 
and reasonable hopes are disappointed, good 
deeds bring mischief on those who do them, 
crime is incessant and the guilty flourish, while 
the innocent languish under calamity. If, then, 
the occasional performance of a self-sacrificing 
act under a sense of duty, is evidence that the 



38 A LAYMAN'S APOLOGY 

First Cause appreciates what we mean by the 
word ought, and finds satisfaction in the realiza- 
tion of the ideas that that word embodies, is 
not the daily commission of all manner of in- 
iquity evidence that it — or He — has also a 
certain sympathy with the reckless indulgence 
of selfish and malevolent passions? Can we by 
any means determine whether these feelings, or 
those that we call morally good, preponderate 
in his nature? 

The answer to these questions must be sought, 
it would seem, in a broad study of the history 
of the human race. To the ultimate benefit of 
mankind, it is plainly reasonable that the pros- 
perity of all other orders of finite intelligences, 
so far as we know them, should be subordi- 
nated. If the general effect of the operation 
of physical laws through the ages of develop- 
ment, past, present and future, is, on the whole, 
to build up and establish a high and ever higher 
type of manhood, so adjusted withal to its en- 
vironment as to secure a great and ever-increas- 
ing degree of happiness, then surely the con- 
clusion must be accepted that the First Cause 



THE ARGUMENT FROM LAW 39 

is benevolent — sympathizes, in other words, 
with good, and wars eternally with evil. If 
natural law does work, on the whole, in this 
direction, no labor need be taken to account for 
the existence of pains and sorrow. Many sup- 
positions will answer. It may be that the high- 
est good might not otherwise be attained; it 
may be, as the Manicheans held (with a very 
considerable show of reason, the present writer 
thinks) that the First Cause could not help the 
intrusion of evil but would have all men to be 
saved from everything that hurts them, if he 
had his unobstructed way; it may be that the 
evil is not really so evil as we think it, but has 
a go,od side after all, possibly disciplinary, that 
we know not of. Or, and as I think wisest of 
all, we may well be satisfied to take the calmly 
scientific view here as in many other depart- 
ments of thought, especially in the physical 
sciences, that we frankly admit our inability to 
understand much that we are compelled to ac- 
cept as true. 

But if humanity is not developing, improving, 
and increasing in happiness through the ages, 



40 A LAYMAN'S APOLOGY 

it does not appear that we are justified in as- 
signing to the First Cause a nature much more 
kindly or more elevated, morally speaking, than 
our own; good traits and evil can both be dis- 
cerned, and which class preponderates we know 
not. 

If, again, men are growing worse and more 
wretched, how can the conclusion be avoided 
that their Creator, judging Him from such of 
His works as we see and know, is inclined to 
moral evil and pursues vicious ends? 

In which direction, then, is our race tending? 
Shall we seek for traditions of a golden age 
among the fading records of the far-off past, 
or expect the coming of our halcyon days in 
the yet remote future? Was the highly unor- 
thodox Gibbon on firm ground in reaching — 
at the close of the second volume of his monu- 
mental work, after taking an extensive survey 
of human history with a breadth of view cer- 
tainly never surpassed and perhaps never 
equalled — what he calls " the pleasing conclu- 
sion that every age of the world has increased 
and still increases the real wealth, the happi- 



THE ARGUMENT FROM LAW 41 

ness, the knowledge, and perhaps the virtue, of 
the human race"? Let sociology answer — 
the " science in which," according to its greatest 
exponent, " the phenomena of all other sciences 
are included." 

In the book from which the above phrase is 
taken, Spencer's "Study of Sociology" — not 
to explore further the writings of that deep and 
clear thinker — the expectation of a constant 
improvement in human character, and a con- 
stant diminution of the present miseries of life, 
is manifestly before the writer's mind from be- 
ginning to end — " the conception," to use his 
own words, " that the remote future has in store 
forms of social life higher than any we have 
imagined." Nowhere explicitly formulated as 
the author's opinion, this belief is everywhere 
taken for granted, and colors every chapter. 
Thus we are told, in regard to man's expected 
moral improvement, that " a "civilized humanity 
will render either glory " [that of proudly re- 
sisting aggression and that of meekly submit- 
ting to it] " impossible of achievement. A di- 
minishing egoism and an increasing altruism 



42 A LAYMAN'S APOLOGY 

must make each of these diverse kinds of honor 
unattainable. Along with a latent self-asser- 
tion, there will go a readiness to yield to others, 
kept in check by the refusal of others to ac- 
cept more than their due." " There has to be 
a continually-changing compromise between 
force and right, during which force decreases 
step by step as right increases step by step, and 
. . . every step brings . . . ultimate good." 
A time is looked for when social discipline shall 
have " so far modified human character that 
reverence for law, as rooted in the moral order 
of things, will serve in place of reverence for 
the power which enforces law." " Those of 
our own day who pride themselves in consum- 
ing much and producing nothing, and who care 
little for the well-being of their society so long 
as it supplies them good dinners, soft beds, and 
pleasant lounging-places, may be regarded with 
astonishment by men of times to come, living 
under higher social forms. ... It will become 
a matter of wonder that there should ever have 
existed those who thought it admirable to enjoy 
without working, at the expense of others who 



THE ARGUMENT FROM LAW 43 

worked without enjoying." And with respect 
to happiness, it is hinted " that after tens of 
thousands of years of discipline, the lives of 
men in society [will] have become harmonious; 
character and conditions [wiW] have, little by 
little, grown into adjustment,^ so that one will 
always like to do what he ought to do, inclina- 
tion and duty going hand in hand, and all action 
will have become pleasurable. 

If it is really to this end that development 
is tending, how can it be doubted that the Crea- 
tor seeks the good of His creatures, takes sat- 
isfaction in the conjunction of virtuous actions 
and that happiness which we all feel ought to 
be their certain reward, and hence is in His 
essential nature benevolent? The deductions 
of sociology may thus be fairly considered as 
supplementing the teachings of an old Hebrew 
poem — " he that planted the ear, shall he not 
hear? he that formed the eye, shall he not 
see ? he that teacheth man knowledge, shall not 
he know?" — with the further lesson that he 
who inspires good deeds is himself good. 

And if it be said that, after all, we can glean 



44 A LAYMAN'S APOLOGY 

only vague intimations of the moral character 
of the First Cause from the most advanced so- 
ciology — • as indeed we glean only vague inti- 
mations of His power, His knowledge, and His 
perceptive and emotional faculties from the 
study of physical law and human character — 
it may not be amiss to reflect that another He- 
brew writer, thousands of years ago, had al- 
ready asked : " Canst thou by searching find 
out God? Canst thou find out the Almighty 
unto perfection? It is as high as heaven; what 
canst thou do? deeper than hell; what canst 
thou know? " x Science therefore adopts only 
the same conclusion as do the sacred books of 
the ancient Jews, when it tells us that if man is 
ever fully to know God, it must be by means 
of a revelation. 

VIII 
Just a word, by way of corollary, on the 
vexed, and sometimes muddled, subject of mira- 
cles. For those who conceive of the universe as 

1 Whence, by the way, had this man this wisdom, living 
so many centuries before " the philosopher of the unknow- 
able " was born? 



THE ARGUMENT FROM LAW 45 

a sort of clock, wKich may perhaps have been 
adjusted, wound up and started by some out- 
side agency, but which now runs by a power 
within itself quite independent of the maker 
and winder (confusing law with force, and 
making of it a kind of mainspring), it may in- 
deed be difficult to believe that there is ever 
any interference with the rotation of the wheels. 
One is strongly inclined to reason that when a 
mechanism has been laboriously constructed to 
run regularly, it is thereafter likely to be let 
alone. But as soon as it is perceived that the 
movements of the universe more closely resem- 
ble those of the fingers of the pianist, impelled 
at all times by direct volition, and having a liv- 
ing personality ever present within them — the 
law in accordance with which they occur having 
really no more objective existence than has the 
melody which the musician is playing — it be- 
comes easily conceivable, no matter how long 
regularity may have continued, that an occa- 
sional variation may at any time be introduced, 
if only there arise a reason for such change. 
And is there no reason for an occasional ir- 



46 A LAYMAN'S APOLOGY 

regularity in the movements of the physical 
world? Will not the intelligent Father of All 
desire, in the progress of the ages, to reveal 
Himself (since science supports theology in the 
inculcation that of themselves they can never 
wholly find Him out) to His intelligent chil- 
dren? And if He is so to reveal Himself, how, 
without miracles, could the revelation be satis- 
factorily attested? How indeed, without mira- 
cles, could a real revelation ever be made at 
all? 



A BOOK SUCCESS THAT NEEDS 
EXPLAINING 

IF ever a literary composition was wounded in 
the house of its friends, was not only so put 
before the public as to make it as little inviting 
as possible to the general reader, and as liable 
as possible to every kind of disadvantageous 
misapprehension, but also was commended to 
attention in such ill-judged fashion as to make 
sure of exciting antipathy, that composition is 
certainly the Bible. It is printed, in the vast 
majority of editions in most modern languages, 
in a manner which could hardly have been bet- 
ter calculated to prevent the possibility of easy 
and appreciative reading. Everything is set 
just alike, whether prose or poetry, idyl or 
drama, which is bad enough — if anybody wants 
to appreciate how bad, let him give five minutes 
to the Ferrar Fenton version, and see with what 
amazing emphasis the varieties of structure and 

47 



48 A LAYMAN'S APOLOGY 

purpose of the different kinds of writing are 
brought instantly to his notice by the varied 
typography. This however is only the begin- 
ning of the maltreatment to which the book has 
been subjected. The matter is chopped up, 
first into "chapters," generally of what seems 
to be intended as approximately uniform length, 
with little regard to continuity of thought or 
story, these chapters marked off by broad 
spaces, big numbers, and in many cases an elab- 
orate and often impertinent and useless sum- 
mary, not seldom including matter of the na- 
ture of commentary, forcing upon the reader 
somebody's ex-cathedra interpretation of what 
may be a very obscure and doubtful passage 
on which there is abundant room for difference 
of opinion. A device better adapted to dis- 
tract attention and discourage consecutive read- 
ing, actually inviting you to lay down the book 
every ten minutes, could hardly be conceived. 
The chapters are then chopped up into 
" verses," still further interfering with con- 
nected thought, often separating closely allied 
clauses, sometimes combining two or more dis- 



A BOOK SUCCESS 49 

tinct matters that should not be fused together. 
Not satisfied with these serious impediments to 
any sort of agreeable and thoughtful perusal, 
the editors of the larger editions have often 
gone much farther. They have plowed a fur- 
row down the middle of the page, or added an 
ugly fringe on each side, getting in a quantity 
of notes of one sort and another, " references " 
and the like, and sprinkled the text freely with 
little letters, numbers, and cabalistic signs, dis- 
tracting to the eye and the attention. I do not 
say that these features are always useless ; quite 
the contrary; some readers, for some purposes, 
need them. But then — imagine any other 
great composition presented to the general 
reader in such shape ! Who does not see the 
heavy handicap it would have to bear in win- 
ning attention ? 

It is doubtless due in no small measure to the 
style of printing adopted, that so few people 
read the Bible as they read other books, really 
trying to understand the author's point of view 
and to follow and weigh his thought. It has 
been turned into a sort of fetich or sibylline 



50 A LAYMAN'S APOLOGY 

oracle, a collection of statements of about equal 
authority and importance, every one to be 
taken blindly and literally at what appears at 
first sight to be its significance, and a certain 
portion to be waded through per diem as a re- 
ligious duty, without taking the trouble to make 
any endeavor at putting it into its proper mental 
setting, to consider the personality or circum- 
stances of the writer or speaker, or the connec- 
tion of what he is saying in one place with 
something that he says over the leaf. So you 
read so many chapters, however unintelligently 
and unsympathetically, you must of course re- 
ceive spiritual benefit! The endless genealo- 
gies; the elaborate geographical details of the 
partition of Canaan among the tribes; the 
twice-told story of the beginning of vegetable 
and animal life, in Genesis; the offerings of the 
princes at the dedication of the tabernacle (de- 
tailed at length for the first man, and eleven 
times repeated, word for word) ; the books of 
Esther and Solomon's Song ; the mysterious im- 
agery of the prophets, like Ezekiel's wheel and 
Daniel's numbers, largely unintelligible to mod- 



A BOOK SUCCESS 51 

ern, or at least to occidental, readers — have 
come to stand, in the minds of many good peo- 
ple, on about the same level as the Fifty-First 
Psalm or the Sixtieth Chapter of Isaiah or the 
opening of John's Gospel. We have, it is to 
be hoped, outgrown the superstition of opening 
the book at random and taking the first pas- 
sage that meets the eye as an answer to a ques- 
tion of conscience or duty; but honestly, do we 
give the Bible very much better intellectual 
treatment, all things considered, than if we still 
used it for such unworthy and nonsensical pur- 
poses? 

That the Bible often, generally, is read in a 
hap-hazard, inattentive, unprofitable fashion, 
a fashion in which no other important book is 
read by anybody who reads it at all, can easily 
be established by asking as many religious peo- 
ple as you like whether they have ever noticed 
any of the cases, happily very few, of careless 
editing or clear blundering by some ancient 
transcriber, as in Luke xvi, 18, where a sen- 
tence has been pitchforked into a place where 
it is hardly possible to suppose that it belongs; 



52 A LAYMAN'S APOLOGY 

or as in the mix-up in Job by which we lose the 
final speech that Zophar must have been de- 
scribed as making, the writer of the drama hav- 
ing doubtless intended to give each of the com- 
forters three addresses in regular turn, Job an- 
swering them one by one; or the seemingly 
useless repetition of II Samuel xxii, in Psalm 
xviii; of II Kings xix, in Isaiah xxxvii; of II 
Kings xxv, in Jeremiah xxxix and again in Jere- 
miah lii ; of Joshua xv, 15-19, in Judges i, n-15. 
Cases of confusion or vain duplication like 
these could hardly occur in any other serious 
book without being detected by readers gener- 
ally; printed as is the Bible, and read, very 
often, in a fashion to agree with the printing, 
it is not to be expected that they would be no- 
ticed. Not, of course, that it is really of vital 
consequence whether such peculiarities are ob- 
served or not; but what is of vital consequence 
is the general habit of careless reading that, 
passing these blemishes by, is certain to pass 
by also relations of thought that are entirely in- 
dispensable to any kind of intelligent apprecia- 
tion of the real purport of the greatest books 



A BOOK SUCCESS 53 

of the canon. For one who really desires to 
understand such writings, it is plainly better, 
far better, not to touch them for a month, and 
then read deliberately a whole book through 
at a sitting if possible, or at least read at one 
sitting the equivalent of many Bible chapters, 
than to read daily a certain limited stint, stop- 
ping short wRere somebody has put in a chap- 
ter heading. For such deliberate reading, 
the whole style of typography of the enormous 
majority of popular editions is just about as 
badly devised as it is possible to imagine; and 
thus, in its appeal for intelligent consideration, 
the book is heavily handicapped. 

And then again, the fetich idea, beside re- 
sulting in a deplorable loss of all sense of 
values and proportions, has brought about a lot 
of more than useless discussion over trivialities, 
diverting attention badly from the real purposes 
of the writers. How can the debates in Job, or 
the deep philosophy of Ecclesiastes, or the 
great lessons that the author of Jonah wanted 
to teach, be appreciated by readers who do not 
perceive that the incidents, whether they ever oc- 



54 A LAYMAN'S APOLOGY 

curred or not, are simply used as pegs on which 
to hang the discourses, but suppose, instead, 
that one must either accept the unprovable and 
utterly immaterial historicity of these books or 
reject them altogether? It has been well said 
that the authors undoubtedly expected their 
readers to exercise some commonsense; and as 
this exercise is unquestionably seriously impeded 
by the way in which their writings are presented 
to the public, both in typographical arrange- 
ment and in the sense in which many people 
who are supposed to speak with authority in- 
sist that they must be taken, it is plain that the 
authors' purpose is largely defeated and that 
their work must suffer from being misunder- 
stood and therefore undervalued. 

Then further, a more serious matter still: 
Certain portions of the Bible which are plainly 
intended as historical are open to at least two 
kinds of reasonable and unfavorable criticism 
that cannot be answered by supposing transcrip- 
tional errors. The real difficulties in the way 
of harmonizing its different parts and making 
what seem at first sight to be its clear teachings 



A BOOK SUCCESS 55 

commend themselves to an enlightened mind and 
conscience, are great and many, quite sufficient, 
as doubtless most intelligent persons are now 
agreed, to negative absolutely the supposition 
once widely held (though without the smallest 
justification in any claim put forward by the 
book itself) that every line was dictated ver- 
batim by the Creator of the universe, the writ- 
ers acting as scribes only, but infallible scribes 

— the view expressed in a well known work on 
" Inspiration and Interpretation " in the follow- 
ing explicit terms: 

" The Bible is none other than the Voice of Him 
that sitteth upon the Throne. Every book of it — 
every chapter of it — every verse of it — every word 
of it — every syllable of it — (Where are we to stop?) 

— every letter of it — is the direct utterance of the 
Most High. The Bible is none other than the Word 
of God, not some part of it more, some part of it less, 
but all alike, the utterance of Him who sitteth upon 
the Throne, absolute, faultless, unerring, supreme." 

One would like to ask the writers of the 
above and similar declarations what they really 
and honestly think of the stones of the making 



$6 A LAYiMAN'S APOLOGY 

of Eve, and of the animals in the ark; of the 
participation of the Egyptian cattle in the suf- 
ferings of the sixth, seventh and tenth plagues 
after " all the cattle of Egypt " had died in 
the fifth; of the many incidents in the Exodus 
(not including anything obviously intended as 
miraculous) that really seem, after a little 
thoughtful figuring, entirely incredible; of the 
awful cruelties, said to have been divinely com- 
manded, that marked the Jewish conquest of 
Canaan; of the amazingly naive statement in 
Judges i, 19 that "the Lord was with Judah, 
and he drave out the inhabitants of the moun- 
tain, but could not drive out the inhabitants 
of the valley, because they had chariots of 
iron" (!), or of the apparent recognition of 
what was practically idolatry and debasing su- 
perstition, in many passages of the same book; 
of the manifest inconsistency in the story of 
Balaam, against whom God's anger was kin- 
dled because he went with the messengers of 
the king after having been divinely commanded 
to do so; of several trifling inaccuracies in 
history in the Gospels, including Luke's (prob- 



A BOOK SUCCESS 57 

ably interpolated) genealogy of Christ — very 
trifling inaccuracies, to be sure, but quite incon- 
sistent with the notion that " every word " was 
divinely inspired exactly as we have it; of the 
incomprehensible parable of the unjust stew- 
ard; or of the list of the twelve tribes in Rev. 
vii, 5, where Dan is omitted, and Joseph and 
Manasseh (father and son, not Ephraim and 
Manasseh, brothers, as in Numbers i, 10) fig- 
ure as the heads of separate tribes. 

It is perfectly evident, surely, that insistence 
on any such view of the writing of the Bible as 
that held by the author above quoted, and for- 
merly, if not even now, very familiar to the 
general public, must act as a powerful deterrent 
to the circulation of the book. If it is all fool- 
ishness, and impious foolishness besides, to read 
it as one reads other serious treatises that are 
supposed to have important practical bearing 
on one's daily life — to read it, that is to say, 
with constant questioning as to its accuracy in 
statement and its reasonableness in doctrine — 
it would seem too much to expect of the great 
majority of men that they read it at all. If it 



58 A LAYMAN'S APOLOGY 

is a choice between reading with full antecedent 
and implicit belief in the plenary inspiration of 
" every letter," and neglecting it in toto, one 
can easily forecast the choice that thousands of 
very intelligent and thoughtful people will 
make. 

Then further, it must be noted that some 
portions of the Bible, which cannot properly 
be called obscene, the innocent intention of the 
writer being perfectly evident, are nevertheless, 
judged by our present standards, highly indeli- 
cate and unpleasant — a drop in the bucket to 
be sure, but still not quite negligible. I do not 
speak of what seems in this age mere coarse- 
ness of expression, ways of saying things that 
can be improved, as in many cases they are im- 
proved in the latest versions, by making a not- 
quite-literal translation; but of such matter as 
the origin of the tribes of Moab and Ammon; 
the stories of the two unhappy Tamars and of 
the Levite of Mount Ephraim; of certain pro- 
ceedings of Absalom during David's exile; of 
a revolting piece of symbolism that is said to 
have been divinely enjoined on the Prophet 



A BOOK SUCCESS 59 

Ezekiel; of several whole pages in the mysteri- 
ous book of that great preacher; and of the be- 
ginning of Hosea. Surely it is clear that the 
inclusion of matter that cannot be read aloud 
in mixed company, and matter that nobody 
would willingly place in the hands of young 
people, must weigh heavily against the circula- 
tion of a book that has no other claim to atten- 
tion than that it deals seriously and authorita- 
tively with great spiritual problems. 

And yet, with these and other handicaps in 
the way of securing the general reading of the 
Bible, how that book does sell ! It has been 
translated complete into about a hundred and 
twenty languages, and portions of it into more 
than five hundred. The total issue of Bibles 
and parts of Bibles must be, according to the 
best compilation of figures possible, certainly 
not less than eighteen millions, probably nine- 
teen millions or more, per annum. How the 
issues of any other book, of any other dozen 
books, one might almost say any other hundred 
books, sink into insignificance in comparison ! 

Nor does it, I think, help much in explaining 



6o A LAYMAN'S APOLOGY 

the unapproached popularity of the Bible as 
compared with other books, to point out that 
its enormous circulation is to a considerable de- 
gree forced — that it is offered very cheaply, 
often gratuitously, and that people are gener- 
ally entreated to read it as a duty. This only 
puts the problem a step back. Why do mil- 
lions of thoughtful men and women urge the 
reading of the Bible, and unite themselves in 
societies that spend vast amounts of money in 
printing it in every tongue under heaven, offer- 
ing it without money or price to those who 
cannot pay for it, and placing it in all sorts of 
public and semi-public rooms, that the wayfarer 
may be tempted to pick it up in odd moments ? 
Has anybody ever thought it worth while to 
press, in any such manner, the circulation of any 
other book ever written? I do not, of course, 
forget the general teaching of the Koran among 
Mohammedans or of the writings of Confucius 
and his followers among the Chinese; but the 
case is not parallel, because these works con- 
stitute practically the entire classical literature 
of the peoples among whom they are circulated; 



A BOOK SUCCESS 61 

and there is really nothing else for the teachers 
to teach, the teachers being what they are. And 
beside all this, Bibles are printed and sold as 
a cold-blooded matter of business for profit, in 
far larger numbers than may generally be sup- 
posed. I received, while writing this chapter, 
the catalog of one of several American pub- 
lishers engaged in producing Bibles commer- 
cially, which illustrates the extent of the busi- 
ness. It is a pamphlet of 68 octavo pages, 
handsomely printed in red and black and 
adorned with a number of engravings, and de- 
scribes a bewildering variety of styles, nearly 
two hundred in all, I should say. A " confi- 
dential " circular to representatives is included, 
setting forth " the great possibilities in the Bible 
business " and beginning with the undoubtedly 
truthful statement, made for a business purpose 
as it is, that " for many years the interest in 
Bible study has been increasing rapidly." The 
cover gives pictures of a number of large rooms 
apparently devoted exclusively to Bible-making. 
While publishers find it profitable to go into 
the business to such an extent, too much impor- 



62 A LAYMAN'S APOLOGY 

tance should not be attached to the matter of 
forced and gratuitous circulation. Fancy any- 
body offering to the general public, in some- 
thing like two hundred different styles, any 
other book that ever was written, and making 
really a big business of selling it ! 

It is submitted, then, that the vast circula- 
tion of the Bible among the most intelligent na- 
tions of the earth, nearly two thousand years 
after its latest line was written, a circulation 
maintained in the face of special difficulties of 
formidable nature, is distinctly a phenomenon 
that invites attention and challenges inquiry. 
How is it to be accounted for? It is surely 
safe to reply, generally speaking, that this book 
lives and spreads because it supplies an impera- 
tive demand of human nature, and in the last 
analysis, for no other reason. But how comes 
it that there is such a demand, and that this 
book meets it ? That is the crux of the matter ; 
and I wish that the reader, if he believes the 
Bible to be inspired in only the same sense as 
applies to other books, would pause here a mo- 
ment, and ask himself what answers he can think 



A BOOK SUCCESS 63 

of. (I say ask himself, because he will find 
it wasting time and trouble to search the litera- 
ture that has been laboriously developed by 
writers of his way of thinking, for any sug- 
gestion of value on this particular point.) If 
no explanation occurs to him that seems quite 
to fit the facts of the case and at the same time 
harmonize with his opinions of the authorship 
and authority of the Jewish-Christian Scriptures, 
let him consider this hypothesis: That the 
book, while not very accurately described as a 
revelation from our maker, is nevertheless the 
record of such a revelation, a record written 
by men who were subject to every kind of hu- 
man frailty and error, but still unmistakably 
such a record of a revelation as appeals irre- 
sistibly by its own force to the minds as well as 
the hearts and consciences of mankind, with in- 
finitely greater power than can possibly be 
claimed for any other writing whatsoever. It 
seems to me that this explanation meets com- 
pletely the demands of the spirit of rigidly scien- 
tific inquiry. As the somewhat " unorthodox " 
Dr. Robertson Smith (who rejects the supposed 



64 A LAYMAN'S APOLOGY 

application to Jesus of Nazareth of the so-called 
messianic portions of Isaiah) well expresses it: 
" It is not and cannot be denied that the proph- 
ets found for themselves and their nation a 
knowledge of God, and not a mere speculative 
knowledge, but a practical fellowship of faith 
with him, which the seekers of truth among the 
Gentiles never attained to." Surely the same 
may be said — not to speak of the clear white 
light of most of the New Testament — of the 
authors of Job and Ecclesiastes, and preemi- 
nently of the Psalmists. Think what one may 
of the so-called " imprecatory " Psalms, it will 
hardly, I suppose, be denied in any quarter that 
their book as a whole reveals a grasp of the 
character of the Creator which fully meets man's 
highest conception and longing, and which is 
quite without parallel in the whole range of the 
voluminous literature of spiritual aspiration out- 
side the Bible. Not less strikingly character- 
istic is the monotheism of the Old Testament, 
monotheism so evidently ingrained in all the 
thinking of its authors that the use, in a few 
places in the early chapters of Genesis, of plural 



A BOOK SUCCESS 65 

words referring to the Creator, hardly needs 
explanation. And note the character of the 
monotheism of even the earliest books of the 
canon, the grandeur of the conception of the 
nature of the one God whose unique existence is 
everywhere assumed. Genius would strive in 
vain, it seems to me, to express now in many 
words such an apprehension of a self-existent, 
eternal, majestic Creator as is embodied in the 
brief phrase in Exodus: " I AM hath sent 
me." That Creator, omnipotent, omniscient, 
omnipresent, just, merciful, good, is seen 
clearly enough through all the mists of even 
childishly anthropomorphic figure, all the mis- 
apprehensions and errors of the fallible men 
who wrote these wonderful books, and whose 
very blunders are enough to show pretty con- 
clusively that they could not possibly have in- 
vented the being whom they describe (if we 
take their writings at what seems to be their 
surface meaning) so inadequately and unsatis- 
factorily. 

But man's highest nature demands, for its 
enlightenment and guidance, more than knowl- 



66 A LAYMAN'S APOLOGY 

edge of our Maker, even supposing such 
knowledge to be as full as our minds, in their 
present condition of development, are capable 
of apprehending. We need a revelation as to 
ourselves, as well ; we ask instinctively : " Flow 
do I stand in God's opinion? What does he 
want of me ? How may I please him ? " Such 
questions seem to have been asked by, it is 
hardly too much to say, all men in all countries 
and in all ages, even by the lowest savages who 
confuse gods and ghosts but are found always, 
I believe, to recognize the existence of imma- 
terial powers whose favor they regard it as 
imperatively necessary for them to endeavor 
to secure. Now the Bible has certainly been 
found to answer this demand. The reader 
feels, all through its pages, that the two great 
divisions of duty, reverence toward God and 
beneficence to man, are constantly recognized, 
even when not formally stated in combination, 
as they repeatedly are. Very suggestive, and 
made lucidly explicit in Christ's summary, is 
the arrangement of the Commandments, the 
first four outlining broadly our relations to 



A BOOK SUCCESS 67 

God, the last six covering pretty completely our 
duties toward each other, in thought as well as 
in deed. Please notice the high spirituality of 
the Tenth. All overt acts in contravention of 
what it demands are pretty completely covered 
by the prohibitions of the Seventh and the 
Eighth, and it seems to be almost certain that 
an uninspired law-giver of the time of Moses, 
especially if laying down rules for a half-savage 
multitude of brick-making slaves just liberated, 
would have stopped right there, stopped where 
all human laws necessarily stop, instead of 
going on to ordain that you must not only re- 
spect other people's property and let their 
wives alone, but you must not even cherish a 
wish that you possessed them. Unless the 
Hebrews had absorbed much more of the re- 
ligious philosophy of the Egyptians than is any- 
where suggested by the story, it seems to me 
that the promulgation of this so sweeping law 
must have amazed them greatly. 

But further, more generally and yet more 
specifically, we have such summaries as these: 
" In every nation he that ( 1 ) feareth Him and 



68 A LAYMAN'S APOLOGY 

(2) worketh righteousness is accepted with 
Him " ; " This is His commandment, that we 
(1) believe on the name of His Son and (2) 
love one another." Sometimes the order is re- 
versed, duty to man coming first, as in the noted 
epitome of pure religion by St. James — " To 
(1) visit the fatherless and widows in their 
affliction and (2) keep himself unspotted from 
the world " ; or as in the anonymous Epistle to 
the Hebrews — " Follow peace with all men 
(1), and holiness (2) without which no man 
shall see the Lord " ; or as in Micah's pregnant 
question, " What doth the Lord require of thee 
but (1) to do justly, to love mercy, and (2) to 
walk humbly with thy God? " One feels also 
that the principle of the Golden Rule, the doc- 
trine that mere justice to our fellow-men is by 
no means all that is required by the highest 
ethics, is recognized all through the Scriptures, 
even so far back as the writing of what many 
students believe to be the oldest book of all, 
for Job protested that he had not " rejoiced at 
the destruction of him that hated me or lifted 
up myself when evil found him or suffered my 



A BOOK SUCCESS 69 

mouth to sin by wishing a curse to his soul." 
Admonitions against that kind of transgression, 
exactly the kind that the Golden Rule repre- 
hends, abound. A section of the formal law, 
as given in Leviticus, reads : " Thou shalt not 
bear any grudge against the children of thy peo- 
ple, but thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself." 
The Proverbs say: " Rejoice not when thine 
enemy falleth, and let not thine heart be glad 
when he stumbleth " ; " Say not, I will do so 
to him as he hath done to me, I will render to 
the man according to his work " ; " If thine 
enemy be hungry, give him bread to eat, and if 
he be thirsty, give him water to drink, for thou 
shalt heap coals of fire upon his head, and the 
Lord shall reward thee." Please notice that 
these are all Old Testament doctrines, and 
notice that they fully cover the state of the 
heart, as well as the behavior; one must not 
even " bear any grudge! 1 They merely antici- 
pate the rule given by Christ, and in fact he 
quoted the affirmative part of the Levitical pre- 
cept word for word. 

Nor is that quite all. It is said that we do 



70 A LAYMAN'S APOLOGY 

not discern the doctrine of man's immortality 
in the Old Testament, and assuredly it is not 
prominent there. Nevertheless the careful 
reader will find in even the oldest books much 
matter that is hardly intelligible unless it be 
supposed that that doctrine is taken for granted. 
The story of the Witch of Endor, for instance, 
a story that shows the dark superstition that 
obscured the religious beliefs of the Jews all 
through the dismal era of the Judges, presup- 
poses life after death, and more than pre- 
supposes it, if we give their full natural meaning 
to the words of the disembodied spirit of 
Samuel addressing Saul: "To-morrow shalt 
thou and thy sons be with me." Similarly, and 
with more emphasis, in Ecclesiastes, the writer 
asserting rather distinctly, it seems to me, the 
possibility of immortality for man exclusively 
among all earthly creatures: "Who knoweth 
the spirit of man that goeth upward, and the 
spirit of the beast that goeth downward to the 
earth?" And still more clearly in Daniel's 
prediction of the resurrection and the conditions 
of attaining exactly the blessed state beyond the 



A BOOK SUCCESS 71 

grave that Christ promised in words no more 
explicit: " Many of them that sleep in the dust 
of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting 
life, and some to shame and everlasting con- 
tempt. And they that be wise shall shine as 
the brightness of the firmament, and they that 
turn many to righteousness, as the stars for ever 
and ever." With all the clearer light of the 
New Testament, there is little of doctrinal 
value to add to that declaration. Well said 
Huxley — yes, the agnostic Huxley — that 
there is no other book which so " humanizes " 
its readers, so makes them " feel that each fig- 
ure in that vast historical procession fills, like 
themselves, but a momentary space in the in- 
terval between two eternities, and earns the 
blessings or the curses of all time, according to 
its effort to do good and hate evil.' , 

Here then, it seems to me, we have the facts : 
Whatever may be said about unprofitable or 
unintelligible portions of the Bible, the con- 
sensus of the impressions of those who have 
read it is that it embodies such a revelation of 
the Creator as fully satisfies man's best concep- 



72 A LAYMAN'S APOLOGY 

tions, and such a revelation as there is no possi- 
ble reason for believing that man could ever 
invent; that it lays down broad rules of conduct 
for man, both in his relations to his Maker and 
to his fellow-creatures, which completely satisfy 
the demands of an enlightened conscience, and 
beyond which no rules could go, while at the 
same time the nature of these rules is such as to 
render almost absurdly incredible the suggestion 
that unaided man may have devised them, espe- 
cially the kind of men who wrote out the law of 
the Jews, and in the times in which they wrote ; 
and that it also promises, even in books written 
long before the advent of Christ, exactly the 
immortality, and prescribes exactly the condi- 
tions of attaining it, that we feel ought to be. 
If the Maker of man revealed himself and his 
will and the existence of a real life beyond the 
grave, to the authors of the Bible as he does 
not to the world at large, and if they did their 
best, in ignorance and prejudice, to set down 
the revelation in writing, the problem is solved. 
No wonder their book holds unrivaled sway in 
the markets of the world. 



ORTHODOXY AND NATURE 

BY " nature," for present purposes, is under- 
stood the material universe, including all 
phenomena with which the non-metaphysical 
sciences deal — the whole body, one might per- 
haps say, of concrete truth, about which, so far 
as satisfactory investigation has been pushed, 
we feel positively sure; the actual facts, exclud- 
ing all hypotheses which are from their nature 
incapable of demonstration. By " orthodoxy " 
(neglecting the etymology of the word), is 
meant a certain system of belief on subjects in 
regard to which neither the senses nor pure rea- 
son can furnish any direct testimony — the 
common opinion of the so-called " evan- 
gelical " churches. This system of belief in- 
dubitably includes, among others, the follow- 
ing points: 

i. That all men, everywhere, incline natu- 
rally to evil rather than to good; and that no 

73 



74 A LAYMAN'S APOLOGY 

one makes persistent progress toward a strictly 
virtuous life without supernatural assistance. 

2. That man, nevertheless, is entirely free in 
his choices as a moral agent, and is therefore 
responsible for all his deeds ; and yet that God 
not only foreknows to the minutest particular 
whatever comes to pass, but also so directs the 
course of events as to work out fully his own 
will, both in the general history of nations and 
in the personal life of every human being. 

3. That the sins of the fathers are visited 
upon the children, to the third and fourth gen- 
eration. 

4. That man's eternal well-being depends 
largely upon his complying with certain con- 
ditions which are stated in a number of ancient 
manuscripts, written in languages that no man 
for centuries has ordinarily spoken, and for the 
most part not explicitly formulated even in these 
writings, but expressed in general terms, or left 
to be inferred by the reader, in such manner 
that there is wide room for differences of opin- 
ion on many not unimportant points. 

5. That some men who appear to lead sober, 



ORTHODOXY AND NATURE 75 

honest, industrious, kindly and useful lives, are 
nevertheless the continual objects of the wrath 
of God, and pass at death to an unenviable 
condition — 

6. From which it is at least doubtful whether 
there shall ever be deliverance. 

That these tenets are regarded with dislike 
by a very large number of the people to whom 
they have been propounded - — excluding such 
persons as have never distinctly apprehended 
their purport in its depth and fullness, and ex- 
cluding also such, at the other extreme of the 
scale, as have either been able to reason out for 
themselves, or have received understandingly 
from others, a satisfactory system of theodicy 

— goes without saying. Some accept them, or 
suppose they accept them, in an unthinking, im- 
plicit way, as matters too sacred for prying 
curiosity or impartial discussion, while secretly 

— half unconsciously, perhaps — wishing that 
most of them were not true. Some hold their 
judgment in suspense, seeking salvation for 
themselves indeed in the manner prescribed by 
the orthodox faith, and laboring, very likely, to 



76 A LAYMAN'S APOLOGY 

persuade others to follow their example, but 
really entertaining all the time a certain degree 
of suspicion that perhaps they are taking un- 
necessary trouble, and a certain degree of hope, 
consequently, that their friends who neglect 
entirely the alleged essentials of salvation may 
fare just as well in the next world notwithstand- 
ing. Some reject them utterly and con- 
temptuously as inconsistent with each other, 
incompatible with the conceptions they have 
formed as to what ought to be the character 
of God, or as on other grounds unworthy the 
belief of independent and fearless thinkers. It 
is the purpose of this paper to point out that 
certain striking parallelisms to these, the most 
" unpopular " dogmas of the Christian faith, 
may readily be discerned in nature, the physical 
universe that surrounds us and of which we 
form a part. 

I 

The doctrine of total depravity, how it has 
been, and now is, scorned and execrated by 
turns! Yet divorce the idea from theological 



ORTHODOXY AND NATURE 77 

phraseology, consider it as a practical every- 
day subject ought to be considered by a rational 
and prudent man who has other men to deal 
with, and how do the facts look? Do the per- 
sons that one knows the most about, generally 
exhibit a marked tendency toward discovering 
for themselves, and then abandoning, their 
faults and bad practices? Are our social and 
business regulations adjusted on the presump- 
tion that men may commonly be trusted and 
that evil purposes are rather the exception? 
Does one ordinarily receive strangers into the 
intimacy of his family on the strength of per- 
sonal attractiveness and courteous mien, with- 
out responsible introduction, the implied or 
expressed guarantee of some trusted friend? 
Does the proprietor of a great mercantile es- 
tablishment allow his subordinates to keep their 
accounts as they please or not at all, taking for 
granted that he will receive from each of them 
the correct amounts of money? Are important 
agreements — no matter how simple — usually 
settled by word of mouth, without the execution 
of formal papers that will bind the signer in a 



78 A LAYMAN'S APOLOGY 

court of law? Is it thought useless to take a 
written receipt for a payment because the per- 
son to whom it is made is not likely to forget 
the transaction? Are loans effected at the 
Stock Exchange without furnishing tangible se- 
curity? Are good habits as easy of acquisition, 
and do they hold one's life as firmly in their 
grasp when established, as bad habits? 

Such questions answer themselves; any child 
old enough to understand them will give the 
correct reply. Put this case to any group of 
young people: " Suppose there are two boys of 
the same age, living next door to each other, in 
houses just alike ; their fathers are employed at 
the same rate of pay in the same factory, and 
in every respect the two homes are very similar. 
Suppose, however, that one of these boys has 
been brought up to speak the truth at all haz- 
ards, to abhor dishonesty and impurity, to con- 
trol his temper, to thank God every morning 
for protection through the night, and to seek 
divine pardon every evening for the sins of the 
day — while the other boy lies and steals and 
fights and swears. Suppose now, that the two 



ORTHODOXY AND NATURE 79 

become intimate friends, and are constantly to- 
gether. What do you think will happen? 
Will each learn of the other — the one, good 
things; the other, evil things? Or will one of 
them gradually copy the other in all things?" 
I have tried the experiment several times, and 
have never yet failed of receiving the same 
reply: "The bad boy will spoil the good 
boy ! " And the experience of mature life, it 
can hardly be doubted, will confirm the opinion 
thus formed under the guidance of the clear in- 
stinct of childhood. Practically, all sane men 
concur in it. 

I was traveling, one pleasant autumn after- 
noon, through the great fruit region of Western 
New York. Two men sitting near me, whose 
words I could not choose but hear, had been 
discussing religious (or irreligious) questions in 
a manner which left no doubt, though that par- 
ticular point had not come up, that they would 
both have pooh-poohed total depravity as the 
nonsensical fancy of an antiquated age. But as 
the widespread apple orchards, heavy laden, 
met our eyes in every direction, the conversation 



80 A LAYMAN'S APOLOGY 

turned upon fruit, its production and marketing, 
and it transpired that one of these men was a 
buyer of apples in large quantities. The risks 
and losses of the business were spoken of, and 
especially the frauds attempted by dishonest 
shippers. The fruit-buyer remarked, however, 
that he knew just one man, only one, whose 
apples he received without examination; they 
were always exactly what they were represented 
to be, or if there was any difference, they 
turned out rather better than the grower 
described them. " Well," answered his com- 
panion, " my private opinion is that some fine 
day when you take an unusually large lot from 
that fellow at a high price, you will find yourself 
egregiously swindled; and then he will play off 
his good character on you, and have some 
plausible story about its not being really his 
fault, and you'll never get satisfaction." The 
first man laughed, and said, yes, he supposed 
so ; it was the way of the world. 

I thought then, and think now, that this an- 
ticipation of villainy was not justified by the 
facts as stated. I believed then, and believe 



ORTHODOXY AND NATURE 81 

now, that in every half-christianized country 
there are thousands of men in every walk of life 
whose word is as good as their bond, and who 
hold their personal integrity above all questions 
of loss or gain of money. But the point of 
interest in the conversation is that these 
speakers — hard, practical men of business, ac- 
customed to driving bargains with all sorts of 
buyers and sellers, and to forming quick and 
shrewd judgments of the character and inten- 
tions of those with whom their vocations 
brought them into contact — that these men 
had derived from their experience so low an 
opinion of the actual morality of their fellows; 
that they had plainly reached the conclusion 
that there are few indeed who are really honest 
except so far as they think it their best policy 
to be so. See what the fruit-buyer's words 
really come to: In all his dealings with the 
growers, he had never encountered but one 
trustworthy man, and he would not be surprised 
to have even him turn out a knave on the first 
especially favorable opportunity; it was " the 
way of the world! " 



82 A LAYMAN'S APOLOGY 

Now the point I wish to make is just this: 
We ordinarily treat our fellow men as if there 
were a strong presumption that they would take 
unfair advantage of us if they could; we know 
by experience (if the trial has been made) how 
much easier it is to acquire new faults than to 
relinquish those we have, while observation 
clearly teaches that evil communications are far 
more apt to corrupt good manners than are 
good manners to over-awe evil communications ; 
and we shall be told every day, on inquiry of 
the men most experienced in the rough struggle 
for life, that " it is the way of the world " to 
assume a cloak of virtue to hide the intention 
of vice — confirming Herbert Spencer's gen- 
eralization that in the management of business, 
" instead of assuming, as people usually do, 
that things are going right until it is proved 
that they are going wrong, the proper course 
is to assume that they are going wrong until it 
is proved that they are going right." 

These facts, established and indisputable, do 
not entirely cover the ground of the theological 
doctrine of total depravity ; but do they not fur- 



ORTHODOXY AND NATURE 83 

nish us, in phenomena of which every student of 
the human race is bound to take account, a close 
parallel to that doctrine, which is often over- 
looked by mystical believers in the " something 
good " in every depraved and abandoned man? 

II 

The world wearied long ago, as well it might, 
of the endless disputes in which many thinkers 
capable of better work have engaged about free 
will and foreordination. There is perhaps no 
more unprofitable task than to endeavor to 
reconcile in words these two conceptions as 
harmonious with each other. But let us keep 
clear of the metaphysics of the case and look 
at nature. 

That man is free in his choices, surely few 
persons outside of jail and bedlam will deny; 
whoever affirms that he is unable to decide as 
he pleases on every question of right or wrong 
doing, may well be suspected, if he speaks 
seriously, either of fraud or insanity. One may 
of course persuade himself that he is too weak 
to carry out his purposes, and so may go wrong 



84 A LAYMAN'S APOLOGY 

while he says he means to go right; but that is 
quite another matter. It is the decision, the 
choosing, with which only we are here con- 
cerned; and the drunkard of most frequent 
drunkenness, or the profane person of the most 
multifarious oaths, while pleading earnestly the 
tyranny of long established habit as an excuse 
for his bad practices, will invariably use lan- 
guage that presupposes and admits his unim- 
paired ability to resolve upon a reformation. 
" I honestly meant to go right home that night, 
but I had to pass so many drinking places, and 
you don't know what struggles I went through 
before I yielded to the temptation " — what 
employer, about to discharge a dissipated man, 
has not heard language like that, in palliation 
of the last disgraceful debauch? And what 
employer, or what court of justice, though pity- 
ing and at the same time despising the weakness 
of the culprit who only means and wishes to do 
right, while persistently in fact doing wrong, 
will acquit him of responsibility for the results 
of his vicious courses on the ground that he 
could not abandon them? The whole structure 



ORTHODOXY AND NATURE 85 

of every description of government and disci- 
pline, from the family up to the nation, has for 
its fundamental principle and corner-stone the 
universally accepted belief that man is morally 
free. 

Yet what feature is more obvious in our daily 
experience than this — that the most carefully 
considered course of action is apt to bring about 
results entirely different from those desired, and 
that not only one's visible career but even the 
inner personal life very often shapes itself, so 
to speak, into forms quite other than those that 
were intended? " So strangely," writes Ma- 
caulay, " do events confound all the plans 
of man ! A prince who read only French, who 
wrote only French, who ranked as a French 
classic, became, quite unconsciously, the means 
of liberating half the Continent from the do- 
minion of that French criticism of which he was 
himself to the end of his life a slave." The 
same conception has crystallized itself into a 
dozen popular proverbs: " man proposes — "; 
" the best laid plans — " ; " there's many a 
slip " — how familiar, how threadbare, is the 



86 A LAYMAN'S APOLOGY 

idea ! And how few men there are who ever 
either do or become what they intended ! How 
little is mental development, how little are our 
tastes and habits, governed in the long run by 
deliberate purpose; or rather, how often do 
they grow in directions diametrically opposed 
to the fixed intention! No man surely who 
knows anything of himself or of mankind, will 
compare a human soul to the steamer that 
plows her way through the billows regardless 
of wind and current, or even to the ship that 
may be tossed about this way and that, but 
finally reaches the port of destination. Rather 
does it resemble the climbing vine, embodying 
indeed a principle of growth and of a certain 
kind of growth, but depending chiefly for its 
form and its direction upon circumstances lying 
entirely outside of its own nature. Now the 
orthodox doctrine asks only a slight extension 
of these well-known truths. Substitute, for 
Macaulay's vague term " events," the perfectly 
clear and intelligible conception of a higher 
power influencing events, and one sees instantly 
that the free will of the creature may have its 



ORTHODOXY AND NATURE 87 

fullest exercise, while yet the purposes of the 
Creator are brought to pass. 

And in regard to the operation of the higher 
power and its bearings upon the responsibility 
of the beings whom, free though they be, 
that higher power directs and restrains, do we 
not see every day how a stronger will may con- 
trol a weaker, without trenching in the smallest 
degree on its freedom of action? The father 
of a bright, active boy, devoted to the sports of 
the field, may have a practically certain pre- 
vision that an invitation to go gunning will be 
joyfully accepted; and his giving the invitation 
is just as truly the cause of the boy's willing to 
avail himself of it, as any one event can be the 
cause of another. The boy's volition to go is 
absolutely free, and yet is the inevitable result 
of the father's action. Now suppose a father 
omniscient and omnipotent, understanding to 
perfection the disposition of his child, and pos- 
sessed of every conceivable facility for present- 
ing every kind of motive — what difficulty is 
there in understanding that he may exercise an 
unlimited control over the child's actions, while 



88 A LAYMAN'S APOLOGY 

yet the child is free and must therefore justly 
be held responsible, both by his own conscience 
and by every tribunal in the universe, for what- 
ever he does? 

It may be thought, however, that there must 
be a fallacy somewhere in this reasoning; that 
though we think we see one will perfectly con- 
trolled by another, while yet acting with per- 
fect freedom, the two processes are mutually 
inconsistent and cannot go on together. But it 
needs no more than an extremely superficial 
acquaintance with the elements of physical 
science to exhibit the folly of rejecting either 
one of two well attested propositions because 
we cannot make them agree with each other. 
As Ruskin wisely said: " Very few truths in 
any science can be fairly stated without such an 
expression of their opposite sides as looks, to a 
person who has not grasp of the subject 
enough to take in both sides at once, like a con- 
tradiction." No satisfactory explanation of 
the phenomena of light can be made, without 
supposing the existence of a medium which pre- 
sents the most contradictory and seemingly im- 



ORTHODOXY AND NATURE 89 

possible properties. The cosmic ether is 
infinitely more attenuated than any gas, but yet 
in many respects bears a much closer resem- 
blance to solid bodies ! It is matter, of course, 
and all matter is supposed to be made up of 
unchangeable and distinct particles; yet, for 
many reasons, the ether cannot be thus consti- 
tuted. And indeed the whole atomic theory — 
universally accepted as it is, necessary as it 
seems to be for the scientific statement of scores 
of classes of phenomena, and almost demon- 
strated to be true, as it is, by the results of 
countless experiments in chemistry, is yet, con- 
sidered as a whole, a bundle of contradictions. 
From one point of view, it seems to be certain 
that the atoms of all substances are exactly 
alike; from another, equally certain that they 
are intrinsically very different in size, weight 
and character. There are strong reasons, al- 
most conclusive proof, for believing the atoms 
to be perfectly hard, mechanically unchange- 
able; and equally strong reasons for supposing 
them not only highly elastic but undergoing 
frequent and most radical transformation. 



90 A LAYMAN'S APOLOGY 

Yet some of the very investigators who are 
most busily engaged in developing this atomic 
theory, would have it believed that only the 
" scientific " view of any subject is worthy of 
attention, and that " science " (by which they 
mean physical science) is always intelligible and 
self-consistent! Nor will it do to answer that 
the undulatory theory of light, and the atomic 
constitution of matter, are only working hy- 
potheses. The simple truth is that all the 
facts point directly toward light-waves and the 
existence of atoms, as the only generalizations 
that can satisfactorily explain them, and that 
the waves and atoms are therefore believed in, 
notwithstanding the contradictions in which the 
thinker immediately finds himself involved be- 
yond hope of extrication. How absurd then, 
how trivial a complaint it is against the theo- 
logical doctrines of natural inclination to evil 
conjoined with moral responsibility, and man's^ 
free will conjoined with God's sovereignty, that 
we do not know how to state them without 
seeming contradictions! In natural science, 
dealing with brute matter that can be seen and 



ORTHODOXY AND NATURE 91 

handled and weighed and analyzed, we accept 
any fact for which satisfactory evidence is pre- 
sented, without caring in the least for our 
inability to make it agree with other facts 
equally well attested. Shall we then in spiritual 
science, where the phenomena to be considered 
are infinitely more complicated, their laws 
infinitely more involved, and where our powers 
of comprehension and reasoning are hardly 
adequate to even skimming the surface of the 
great ocean of unknown and perhaps to us un- 
knowable truth — shall we in spiritual science 
demand that every statement must be seen fully 
and exactly to square with every other before 
it can be rationally believed? If the student 
of natural philosophy, or the chemist, demands 
that this be done, he at the same time condemns 
his own methods of procedure as fundamentally 
erroneous, and their results as the delusive fig- 
ments of his misguided imagination. 

Ill 

In the anxiety which many foolish people dis- 
play to find cruelty, oppression and injustice in 



92 A LAYMAN'S APOLOGY 

the primary tenets of the orthodox faith, a 
forced and unnatural interpretation of the doc- 
trine that the sins of the fathers are visited upon 
the children, is often insisted on. To the un- 
prejudiced reader, the words of the Second 
Commandment, whatever may be thought of 
other passages of Scripture (among which, the 
1 8th chapter of Ezekiel should never be over- 
looked), convey no hint of the imputation of 
sin or of the descent by inheritance of divine 
displeasure; but merely embody a truth that is 
simply indisputable. Our scientific friends at 
all events, who regard every phenomenon of 
whatever kind as the necessary result of a con- 
geries of indestructible forces acting strictly in 
accordance with unvarying laws, ought to be the 
last people in the world to object to the manifest 
deduction that a child must suffer for his par- 
ents' sins. Indeed the fact is too obvious for 
argument. So far as a just God's judgment 
upon each man's moral character is concerned, 
that judgment must be conceived as made up 
of an inconceivable number of elements, the 
soul having credit, so to speak, for every dis- 



ORTHODOXY AND NATURE 93 

advantage, however trifling, under which it may 
have labored, and being charged, on the other 
hand, with every act of willful transgression 
and with every neglect of opportunity of im- 
provement. In this balancing of accounts, the 
transgressions of the father must certainly be 
placed to the credit of the children just so far 
as they have operated to incline the latter in- 
voluntarily toward sin; it were the grossest 
injustice to expect from the child of a depraved 
wretch the same clean record that is looked for 
from the members of a Christian family. But 
so far as the course of our earthly life is con- 
cerned — that also being the resultant of an 
immense number of conflicting forces — it is 
manifest that every transgression of any sort of 
law must put the children of the transgressor 
at a certain disadvantage for all futurity; physi- 
cally, mentally, morally, they can never be quite 
what they might have been had they sprung 
from a line of sinless progenitors. To put the 
thing into concrete form, every syphilitic baby 
is a monument of transgression of physical 
law committed before its birth. Nobody 



94 A LAYMAN'S APOLOGY 

imagines that God blames the poor child for its 
ailments; but the regular operation of divine 
law will nevertheless inevitably bring upon it a 
train of untold miseries, as the fruit of its an- 
cestors' folly or sin. The fact is stated to man- 
kind as a motive to abstain from transgression ; 
what stronger motive, to a parent worthy of 
the name, could the Infinite Father offer? 

" But the cruelty involved? the innocent suf- 
ferers? You orthodox people will not let us 
look at the operations of nature as natural. 
You insist upon it that a personal God acts di- 
rectly through them all, and acts freely, however 
regularly. How then, if he is really a loving 
father, can he bear to bring misery upon inno- 
cent children in consequence of transgressions 
for which they are in no manner responsible? " 

Well, the goodness of God is established by 
another chain of arguments. Remember, please, 
that many highly unorthodox thinkers profess to 
find nothing but beneficence in nature, and feel 
perfectly easy in the conclusion that the author 
of nature is too soft-hearted even to punish sin. 
" The infinite goodness that I have experienced 



ORTHODOXY AND NATURE 95 

in this world," writes Renan, " inspires me with 
a conviction that at least an equal goodness per- 
vades eternity; and in that I put my trust." 
But as to the possibility of God's permitting 
grave evils to light upon the innocent and well- 
deserving, what do we see every day around us? 
Surely no one can suppose that inherited suffer- 
ing is the only example of suffering without spe- 
cial corresponding blameworthiness. " The 
deists have contended," said a well-known and 
eloquent infidel lecturer, " that the Old Testa- 
ment is too cruel . . . to be the work of 
a . . . loving God. To this, the theo- 
logians have replied, that nature is just as cruel; 
that the earthquake, the volcano, the pestilence 
and storm, are just as savage . . . ; and to 
my mind," he goes on — a remarkable admis- 
sion — " this is a perfect answer." Thus is 
orthodoxy supported on diametrically opposite 
sides by the observations of " freethinkers," 
one party stoutly maintaining that the Creator 
certainly loves mankind, while the others insist 
that the course of natural events is just as cruel 
and " savage " as any doctrine of revelation. 



96 A LAYMAN'S APOLOGY 

Each of these opinions is doubtless true; but 
exaggerate either of them far enough to come 
into conflict with the tenets of orthodoxy, and 
it forthwith annihilates the other ! — which is 
just what we should expect, if nature and 
orthodoxy are from the same hand. 

IV 

The ancient Jews have no lack of modern 
sympathizers in demanding a sign from heaven 
before they will believe. A true revelation 
from God, it is said, would speak in trumpet 
tones to every human being; there could be no 
doubt of its divine origin, and no difference of 
opinion as to the meaning of the message. Can 
it be possible, it is asked, that if the Creator de- 
sired to impart to man the momentous truth of 
a future life and the conditions of attaining 
immortal felicity, he would speak only, or 
chiefly, in hints and suggestions, communicated 
at long intervals of time to selected individuals, 
and preserved for future ages through the in- 
strumentality of fading parchments? Can it be 
that the possibility of our escaping from eternal 



S 



dP 



ORTHODOXY AND NATURE 97 

woe depends upon our ability to decipher old 
manuscripts, written in languages long since 
disused and well-nigh forgotten? And what, 
after all, does the so-called revelation reveal? 
How diverse, how contradictory, are the con- 
clusions drawn by different students of that 
heterogeneous collection of books called the 
Bible! How can one be sure of the correct- 
ness of any doctrine without thorough investi- 
gation for himself — without studying the 
documents patiently in the original tongues and 
acquiring considerable knowledge of the his- 
torical circumstances of their composition? 
Yet this, few men can do. Life is short, and its 
physical necessities demand our first attention. 
Is it reasonable to suppose that our heavenly 
Father, if there is such a being, would trust his 
messages to a channel of communication so ex- 
tremely precarious? In learning what God de- 
sires of us, must we really place so much 
dependence, not only on the investigations of 
other men, but even on their mere interpreta- 
tions and opinions? "A direct revelation to 
myself, so conveyed that I cannot doubt its celes- 



9 8 A LAYMAN'S APOLOGY 

tial origin, so clear that I cannot misconstrue its 
purport — this I will accept; but as to reve- 
lations to other people, centuries ago, with no 
satisfactory opportunity afforded me to examine 
their signs of authenticity, and embodying state- 
ments that I do not at all understand, together 
with many things that I am quite unwilling to 
believe — that is another matter altogether. 
It is unreasonable to expect me to receive de- 
liverances of this kind at second-hand, and in 
so confused and uncertain a form besides. No ! 
Let God speak, and I will hear him. But as to 
records in books of what other men say he has 
spoken, I have something else to do than to 
study them ; I cannot puzzle my brains over such 
mystical and enigmatic compositions." 

How then is it with nature? It is of a good 
deal of importance to man — is it not? — to 
know that poppy-juice will produce sleep, and 
chloroform insensibility to pain, and nightshade 
death. It is quite desirable to be aware that 
smallpox spreads by contagion and may be 
warded off by the use of bovine virus. It adds 
considerably to our comfort to be able to smelt 



ORTHODOXY AND NATURE 99 

iron ore, and to find coal-beds by the indications 
of geology. It materially facilitates navigation 
to discover that the barometer falls before a 
storm, and that a magnetized needle, swinging 
free, points always northward. Now has 
nature proclaimed these truths in a voice which 
all must hear and none can misunderstand? 
Are a system of materia medica and a summary 
of the laws of hygiene written legibly on the 
surface of our bodies? Are the strata of the 
rocks plainly labeled, " Here is Iron," " Below 
is Coal," in characters which the first man as 
well as the latest could interpret at sight? Are 
the truths of natural philosophy self-evident 
without experimentation and reasoning? Do 
we owe nothing to the researches of those who 
have gone before us, and is one man's opinion 
as good as another's, in questions of material 
science? Nature is a mine wherein are em- 
bedded diamonds beyond price. Health, 
strength, long life, the ability to do and to be, 
the reputation of a Copernicus or a Newton, 
the intellectual exhilaration that accompanies 
important researches and adds the keenest 



ioo A LAYMAN'S APOLOGY 

pleasure to great discoveries — these are the 
prizes that she offers to the successful explorer 
of her secret ways. To many persons, such 
jewels appear to be far more attractive than the 
promise of a celestial crown. But how one 
must toil for them! How few, how vague, 
how easily mistaken, are the indications that 
visible nature gives us of the positions of her 
precious nuggets! How often do explorers, 
though gifted with the sharpest mental vision, 
go woefully astray and end in ludicrous or 
miserable disaster! Ages innumerable have 
elapsed, we are told, since man, with intellectual 
faculties essentially the same as those he now 
employs, was developed from the anthropoid 
apes. Yet it is scarcely seven generations since 
alchemy became chemistry and some sound 
knowledge of the constitution of matter began 
to be acquired. Four centuries have not passed 
since it was demonstrated that the world moves ; 
and the time is hardly yet arrived for the mass 
of mankind to grasp the rationale of the 
changes in the appearance of the moon and to 
understand that her phases have no relation to 



ORTHODOXY AND NATURE 101 

terrestrial events. How little, even yet, do we 
know of physiology and minute anatomy! 
Who can tell us the cause of neuralgia, the 
peculiarities of action of a diseased nerve? 
Why, it is not yet three hundred years since the 
very elementary discovery was made that the 
arteries carry blood! How slowly and pain- 
fully have we acquired the mere smattering of 
knowledge that we now possess as to the uni- 
verse at large and even as to the mechanism of 
our own bodies ! How then can it consistently 
be expected that the God of nature should pro- 
claim aloud, in clear and unmistakable tones, 
the attributes of his own being, the existence of 
a future life for man, and the conditions of at- 
taining felicity beyond the grave? Not thus 
does he smooth the path for our feet in seeking 
the knowledge that we most need for the 
amelioration of our earthly life. One position 
is believed to be impregnable: The truths that 
absolutely must be believed, and the duties that 
absolutely must be done, in order to escape the 
divine wrath with which his conscience threatens 
every sinner, are revealed so plainly in the 



102 A LAYMAN'S APOLOGY 

Scriptures, and sanctioned so unmistakably by 
the reason and the conscience, that the wayfar- 
ing man, though a fool, need not err — just as 
the elementary fact that our physical systems 
require food and drink and sleep, is taught us 
by nature without our seeking. But as one who 
would make any progress in physical life must 
bestir himself to learn other things than these, 
so must he who desires to attain any consider- 
able knowledge of the spiritual world, or any 
purely intellectual grasp of the evidence that 
the Scriptures really did come from God, search 
for it with painstaking diligence, availing him- 
self wherever he can of the investigations of 
others, and never absolutely certain that on 
many points he is not more or less in error. It 
has been well said that the Bible contains a sys- 
tem of divinity in much the same sense as that in 
which a system of geology lies enfolded in the 
rocks. If the author of the one is the same be- 
ing as the maker of the other, ought not such 
similarity of plan to be confidently expected, 
rather than seized upon as a ground for main- 
taining that while the rocks were certainly not 



ORTHODOXY AND NATURE 103 

constructed by human agency, the Scriptures 
were? 



The doctrine that many agreeable and per- 
haps useful persons are lost, while some very 
unpleasant people are finally saved, is often re- 
garded as a hard saying — who can hear it? 
But has the objection any better basis than mere 
confusion of thought? To clear the ground of 
extraneous matter, let it first be distinctly ad- 
mitted that the man who cares not at all to be 
of service to his fellows, and who makes no 
effort to correct his own infirmities of temper 
and disposition, deceives himself greatly if he 
imagines that he enjoys the favor of God, de- 
pending for salvation upon his intellectual belief 
or his emotional experiences. Let it be further 
admitted — what is the mere dictum of common 
sense — that the benevolent and kindly soul 
must fare better in the next world, other things 
being equal, than the selfish or malicious trans- 
gressor. But this being fully understood, the 
great fact remains that if there is a personal 



104 A LAYMAN'S APOLOGY 

God, the obligations resting upon every human 
being as a moral agent divide themselves into 
two classes, duties toward the Creator and 
duties toward man; and that even the abso- 
lutely perfect discharge of one of these sets of 
duties, were that possible, can furnish no excuse 
for the neglect of the other. That is to say, 
the most benevolent and useful man on earth, 
if he lead a godless life, never thanking his 
Creator for his goodness, never perhaps giving 
himself seriously to the consideration of the 
question whether the Creator has demands 
upon his attention or has made a revelation of 
his will to mankind, should not be surprised at 
finding an appalling indictment lodged against 
him at the great assize on charges entirely un- 
connected with his demeanor toward his fellow- 
men, whatever that demeanor may have been. 

A similar principle appears plainly enough in 
human transactions, and is universally recog- 
nized. An undutiful son, detected in an act of 
base ingratitude and disrespect toward his 
father, will hardly be allowed to plead, in ex- 
tenuation of his fault, that he treats his own 



ORTHODOXY AND NATURE 105 

children kindly. A defaulting bank cashier 
would be considered silly as well as dishonest 
should he expect the directors to overlook his 
crime because of his scrupulous observance of 
all the commandments except the eighth. A 
careless railroad engineer, on trial for man- 
slaughter in having recklessly brought about a 
terrible disaster, will scarcely undertake to de- 
fend himself by showing that he always pays his 
debts and keeps the machinery bright. In each 
case, the virtues referred to may be rightly 
claimed as his own by the culprit; but that fact 
is entirely irrelevant to the matter in hand, and 
would be so considered even by the illogical 
sentimentalists who imagine that 

" Christ ain't a-going to be too hard 
On a man that died for men," 

however irreligious or grossly immoral may 
have been that man's whole life. 

There is another way of looking at the ques- 
tion. The orthodox faith holds that the 
Savior's atonement is offered to mankind both 
as a cure for the injuries inflicted by sin upon 



106 A LAYMAN'S APOLOGY 

our moral nature and as a protection from ter- 
rible evils yet to come. How is it with wounds 
and ailments in our bodies? A bone of the leg 
is broken; will any degree of general health, 
or any perfection of muscular development, 
enable the patient to walk while that fracture is 
unrepaired? A man has taken a poison for 
which there is an effective antidote. How 
much will you accomplish by merely placing 
him in a luxurious bed and supplying him with 
nutritious food and refreshing drinks ? Nature 
cares nothing for the fine physique in the one 
case or the favorable environment in the other. 
The needed corrective must be applied, or the 
activity of the body is ended. There is no pos- 
sible escape from the alternative. 

And how is it in regard to protection from 
the terrible wheels of the material universe that 
will crush us remorselessly if we willfully or 
ignorantly fall in their way? We live in the 
midst of dangers, from which indeed we are 
liberally provided with the means of escape, 
but which will brook no trifling. It is a winter 
evening while I write. Outside my windows 



ORTHODOXY AND NATURE 107 

blows a whistling storm of fine dry snow that 
cuts and sears like fire, and the mercury has 
been for hours near zero. Inside, there is 
warmth and safety and comfort. Coal burns, 
and gives me heat. Brick walls, heavy doors, 
double windows, a tight roof, defy the tempest. 
But suppose I fail to take advantage of the 
shelter. Suppose I go forth, scantily clothed, 
into the open fields. What pity can I expect 
from nature? — that same beneficent nature 
that offers me, in such lavish profusion, coal for 
fuel, and wood for timbers, and clay for bricks, 
and sand and lime for glass. She will ask no 
questions, but summarily destroy me for my 
foolhardly presumption. The principle is every- 
where and always the same; not one single 
transgression of the thousand regulations that 
nature has prescribed for our life will be for- 
given or overlooked in consideration of our 
scrupulously observing the nine hundred and 
ninety-nine. Each infraction, however trifling, 
is surely punished ; and if one offends on a vital 
point, there can be no result but certain death. 
Beneficence, provision for our wants, is every- 



108 A LAYMAN'S APOLOGY 

where; mercy, the overlooking of transgression, 
is nowhere to be discerned. 

It surely therefore must be from some source 
very different from the study of nature that men 
have drawn the conclusion that they can expect 
the God of nature to pardon their neglect of 
himself, on the ground that they have been use- 
ful and agreeable to their fellow-men — which 
is exactly equivalent to pardoning the infraction 
of one law because another has been fulfilled! 

VI 

And in respect to the endless duration of the 
punishment. It has been said, in high-sounding 
phrase, that it must be impossible for a finite 
being to commit against the Infinite any sin de- 
serving eternal suffering. That may be true; 
the proposition is of such a nature as hardly to 
admit of satisfactory discussion. But surely it 
is quite too mechanical and limited a conception 
of the world of woe to think of it as a torture 
chamber wherein pain is deliberately inflicted by 
higher powers in execution of a judicial sen- 
tence — so much sin on earth, so much the 



ORTHODOXY AND NATURE 109 

wretchedness of expiation beyond. What the 
Scriptures tell us is that such persons as de- 
liberately reject in this life the means of sal- 
vation, pass at death into an estate of misery. 
They do not tell us that further sin is impossible. 
Blessed be God, they do not positively and in 
set form proclaim that repentance is impossible 
either; the door of hope is not absolutely and 
certainly, beyond all question or doubt, closed 
at the portals of the grave. But how is it about 
sinning and repenting here ? Can any truth be 
more manifest than that the probability of a 
transgressor's forsaking his evil ways dimin- 
ishes with a fearful ratio as he goes on in years 
and in wickedness? The principle of inertia, 
in progressive motion as well as in rest, is to 
be discerned just as plainly, by those who care 
to look for it, in spiritual as in physical move- 
ment. On what other principle do our laws 
act, in distinguishing so sharply between the 
first transgressions of youth, heinous though 
they may be, and the misdeeds (perhaps less 
black in themselves) of old offenders, and in 
making of juvenile delinquents a class by them- 



no A LAYMAN'S APOLOGY 

selves? The young lawbreaker may be saved, 
and we send him to a reformatory; the hard- 
ened malefactor of mature years, there is no 
hope for him — let him go to a prison, and 
the longer the better! 

Now what reason can analogy suggest for 
the belief of our Universalist brethren and the 
" free-thinkers " who outdo them, that this 
downward motion of the soul is to meet with a 
check at the grave or beyond it? A cannon- 
ball is shot out into space — when will its 
motion cease? A child's spine grows crooked 
for a dozen years — when will it begin to 
straighten? A little aneurism forms on the 
aorta — when will the artery consolidate itself 
into its normal dimensions? A man acquires 
habits of falsehood and dishonesty, and they 
grow upon him for fifty years — when will he 
probably cast them off? A rational creature 
of God passes his whole life, so far as we can 
see it, in entire neglect of his Creator — when 
will he begin to reverence the Eternal Purity? 
Let death come soon or late ; death is only the 
crumbling back of the corporeal organs to their 



ORTHODOXY AND NATURE in 

elements; why should the steady progression of 
the spirit toward evil, that we have watched for 
thirty, or fifty, or eighty years, be even re- 
tarded by its freedom from physical restraints? 
Does not the analogy of all things here sug- 
gest rather an accelerated movement, acceler- 
ated with ever increasing velocity, in the same 
line as before? If there is one solemn lesson 
that the observation of nature forces more than 
another upon the attention of the observer, it 
is surely this : Processes of deterioration, once 
well established, generally end only when there 
is no more material to work upon. The mold 
propagates itself in all directions; the rust in- 
creases; the ulcer spreads; the gangrene ad- 
vances toward vital parts; the dishonest boy, 
unrestrained, makes a dangerous man; the liar 
at fifteen, unless some powerful influence of 
good transforms his moral nature, is a defaulter 
at twenty-five; the man of occasional excesses 
in middle life becomes a confirmed sot in later 
years. Facilis, ever facilis, is the descensus 
Averni; and if sin brings suffering now, why 
not a century from now? Why not a million 



ii2 A LAYMAN'S APOLOGY 

centuries? An immortal soul, eternally going 
wrong — why not eternally suffering the 
penalty? 

If now the points of resemblance that have 
been suggested between the system of belief 
that is called " orthodoxy " on the one hand 
and the constitution of nature on the other, are 
justified by correct observation, one of two con- 
clusions would seem certain. If it be main- 
tained that orthodoxy is like nature because it 
has been developed from the study of nature, 
the deduction must instantly follow that its doc- 
trines are probably sound. It is one of the 
lamentable infirmities of thinking very apt to 
result from that exclusive attention to material 
things which now-a-days so often usurps to 
itself the name of " science," that many great 
investigators of this lower realm of phenomena 
are prone to fail to recognize, and therefore 
prone to reject, their own methods when ap- 
plied to higher objects of thought. They work 
by analogy without scruple in determining the 
probable condition of affairs on the planet 



ORTHODOXY AND NATURE 113 

Jupiter, or the mode of life of the palaeozoic 
fauna; and they deride analogy as the ignis 
fatuus of imaginative dreamers, the moment 
you apply it to the study of our spiritual nature ! 
A thinker of broader intellect can hardly fail 
to perceive that careful and well-based deduc- 
tions from what happens here and now, in the 
psychological no less than in the material uni- 
verse, are extremely likely to prove trustworthy 
guides in regard to the events of all the future. 
But in point of fact, we know very well that 
no system of sacred philosophy was ever de- 
veloped, in large degree or in small, from the 
study of nature. Theologians have been men 
of the closet, not of the laboratory, the field 
or the market-place. Taking as a basis the 
sketchy outline furnished by the writers of the 
Scriptures, they have applied to it the methods 
of ordinary logic, often going wrong, no doubt, 
but successively correcting each other's results, 
till the comprehensive system on which, in ev- 
ery essential point, all evangelical churches are 
agreed, has gradually assumed its present form 
and dimensions, including no small number of 



ii4 A LAYMAN'S APOLOGY 

points of unlooked-for similarity to the mani- 
fest operations of nature. Whence came the 
original outline? — involving as it does so much 
that man would never have either expected or 
desired, so much that is mysterious if not in- 
comprehensible, so much that is not only seem- 
ingly inconsistent and irreconcilable with itself, 
but in conflict with human reason as well — 
and withal, so much that on close inspection re- 
minds us of similar processes and similar rid- 
dles in the world of every-day phenomena all 
around us. 

The simple, natural, almost unavoidable con- 
clusion would seem to be this — that the First 
Cause of nature (say "God" or not, as you 
please) must have been in some manner the 
inspirer of the teachings of the Bible in regard 
to our relations with the Creator, our duties 
and our future — the author, that is to say, of 
the great conceptions and beliefs that lie at 
the foundation of the orthodox faith. If a 
more probable hypothesis can be framed, bet- 
ter accounting for all the facts, neither ma- 
terialist nor agnostic has yet told us what it is. 



CHRISTIANITY AND OTHER 
RELIGIONS 

A SENTENCE in the preface to this little 
book may bear amplification. I certainly 
do not myself believe that a sane man, rejecting 
the evidence that Christianity is from the Crea- 
tor, could accept any other religion as divine. 
But there is a view of the case that deserves 
respectful consideration, the opinion that the 
essential features of Christianity are divinely 
inspired undoubtedly, but only in the same 
sense as are the essential features of other 
faiths. To inquire how far this belief is sup- 
ported by established facts is the same as to 
inquire whether it is a scientific doctrine. Does 
it appear that the Creator has revealed Himself 
at sundry times and in divers manners to many 
other nations as well as to the Jews ? 

For one, I certainly would not answer no. 
Very large parts of the best non-Jewish the- 

"5 



n6 A LAYMAN'S APOLOGY 

ology of ancient times are avowedly conjecture 
only, just the sort of conjecture that we should 
expect from elevated minds if man really has a 
Maker and hears to him anything like a filial 
relation. Such is manifestly the theology of 
Cicero among the Latins and Plato among the 
Greeks. It may have been based on a certain 
degree of subtle inspiration, inspiration just as 
genuine, so far as it went, as was vouchsafed 
to the writer of any book in the Bible. This 
inspiration did not go far, however; and its 
teachings were never so promulgated as to ex- 
ercise any influence worth mentioning on the 
belief or the character of the people at large. 
It was a sort of dilettante philosophizing, bear- 
ing none of the marks that we feel ought to 
and must attest a true and sufficient revelation 
from the Eternal. 

But it does not seem easy to dispose of all 
the high spiritual insight of the " heathen " 
world by the simple expedient of calling it a 
guess. The facts do not look that way. Con- 
sider for instance the tremendous solidity of 
the belief in immortality that prevailed among 



CHRISTIANITY 117 

the ancient Egyptians and so worked itself out 
in constant practical application as abundantly 
to justify Herodotus in saying of these people, 
as Paul afterwards said of the Athenians, that 
they were exceedingly religious. There was no 
need to admonish them that the present life is 
a vapor, appearing for a little time and then 
vanishing away; they understood that per- 
fectly, and seem to have lived far more, in a 
sense, in the next world than in this, devoting 
to the preparation for eternity a proportion of 
time and effort that shames the most enlightened 
nations of the world to-day. Much of their 
method seems perhaps laughable to us, though 
it may better be thought of as deeply pathetic, 
— their strenuous endeavors for the preserva- 
tion of the bodies of the dead, and their childish 
provision Ifor the supposed material necessi- 
ties of post-mortem existence. But their view 
of the hereafter was not all superstitious folly; 
far from it. The picture of the last judgment 
drawn in their great religious treatise, the 
" Book of the Dead," a composition of un- 
known antiquity but certainly far antedating 



n8 A LAYMAN'S APOLOGY 

the twenty-fifth century before Christ, is in all 
its main outlines as strong and masterly as 
words could paint. The deceased soul is 
brought before Osiris, who represents mercy 
and love above all things but nevertheless ren- 
ders justice, and who is aided by forty-two as- 
sessors, each charged with the duty of inquir- 
ing about one of the listed sins of the Egyptian 
catalog, exactly such transgressions, for the 
most part, as would be denounced to-day. They 
include blasphemy, deceit, theft, murder, adul- 
tery, cruelty, disorderly conduct, idleness, 
drunkenness, injustice, excessive talkativeness, 
indiscreet curiosity, slander, envy, false accu- 
sation, keeping milk from the mouths of suck- 
lings, abusing slaves, defiling the river, divert- 
ing water during the inundation, taking the 
clothes of the dead, and several kinds of com- 
mercial dishonesty, covering specifically every 
sort of cheating by false weights and measures. 
Nor is this all. The candidate for happy im- 
mortality must prove the exercise of positive 
as well as of negative virtue. It must be 
^shown that he has given bread to the hungry, 



CHRISTIANITY 119 

water to the thirsty, clothing to the naked, a 
boat to the shipwrecked mariner, and in gen- 
eral that he has made it his delight to do what 
men command and the gods approve. Nor is 
this all. His heart must be fundamentally 
right; and it is weighed with much solemnity, 
on scales carefully tested in his presence im- 
mediately before the trial. Actions, motives, 
and even the underlying character, all come 
into painstaking review. What more can we 
imagine of a final judgment in truth and right- 
eousness? 

Egyptian mythology, moreover, for all its 
imaginary pantheon of nondescript creatures, 
some wholly bestial, some half human but with 
heads of animals and birds, seems to have been 
distinctly monotheistic at bottom, the priestly 
order, and probably the more intelligent 
classes of laymen, understanding perfectly that 
the many gods were really only appearances 
of the One Supreme Being of whose existence 
they were quite as sure as are we. There is 
no trace of idolatry in their worship, not even 
of the subtle form in which the devotee, bow- 



120 A LAYMAN'S APOLOGY 

ing down before a graven image, is supposed 
to venerate, not the image itself, but the un- 
seen divinity that the image represents. The 
most ancient documents discovered speak re- 
peatedly of " the only true living God," " who 
has made all things but has not Himself been 
made," a being never represented in Egyptian 
sculpture or painting, and to whom no name is 
given. Undoubtedly this article of their creed 
was largely esoteric, not grasped at all by the 
common people in their devout worship of the 
individual gods and goddesses, and overlaid 
probably, even in the minds of the learned, by 
a mass of superstition. Also it must be ad- 
mitted that we find among their pictorial rep- 
resentations of the divine powers of nature 
some figures of such gross obscenity that I 
think no book portrays or even describes them, 
certainly no book intended for general circu- 
lation — one must see them on the walls of the 
tombs to learn what they are. Nevertheless 
and for all that, it would certainly seem to 
savor of unscientific rashness to deny the possi- 
bility of there having been a real divine revela- 



CHRISTIANITY 121 

tion to the minds of those astonishing Africans 
who erected, long before the dawn of authentic 
history, a great number of such enormous tem- 
ples as amaze the beholder to-day, to say noth- 
ing of their constructing, for a purpose closely 
allied to religion, by far the largest and most 
massive building on earth, a building that is 
believed to have been thousands of years old 
when Abraham was born. 

So also with the great religions of India, and 
possibly with those of other countries that have 
made smaller or less permanent impression on 
the thinking of the world. Under the revolt- 
ing cover of disgusting vice and almost unim- 
aginable folly that makes most of these faiths 
the synonym, in many minds, for every form 
of evil, there does generally seem to be dis- 
cernible, on research, a certain qualified form 
of monotheism not different in essential sub- 
stance from that of the Hebrew Scriptures, to- 
gether with some broken or inchoate elements 
of a moral law that would have been approved 
by Moses or Nehemiah. We read such sen- 
tences as these in the ancient books of the East: 



122 A LAYMAN'S APOLOGY 

" The true name is God, without fear, without 
enmity, the Being without death, the Giver of 
salvation." " One self-existent, Himself the 
Creator, one continueth; another never was and 
never will be." " Meditate upon Him in 
whose hands are life and death." " Let faith 
in God characterize all your thoughts, words 
and actions." " If you call upon God, you will 
be able to subdue your imperfections, and the 
evil inclinations of your mind will depart from 
you ; but they will return, when you cease to call 
upon Him." 

Similar glimmerings of the great truths of 
the Jewish-Christian Scriptures may be found, 
no doubt, in the religious literature of many 
other lands. They may have been guesses; 
they may have been inspired. Be that as it 
may, the differences between these faiths and 
that of the Bible are evidently immeasurably 
great. You will hardly find in any of them 
the doctrine of divine pardon for sin on re- 
pentance and reformation without some form 
of painfully working out an atonement; and 
you will miss other material features of the 



CHRISTIANITY 123 

Christian revelation. It is only in their very 
highest and on the whole exceptional charac- 
teristics that these faiths bear any resemblance 
to Christianity; and their practical outworking 
among the people is in a direction exactly the 
opposite of hers, resulting in polytheism, gen- 
erally in idolatry, and very often, certainly in 
India through all the ages, in a horrible condi- 
tion of society and the degradation of re- 
ligious ceremonies to the practice of unbridled 
vice. By their fruits ye shall know them. 

Remains for consideration, however, one 
system of thought that has emerged from the 
darkness of the native faiths of India, being 
indeed claimed to be the mother of them all, 
and has spread widely over the earth in recent 
years, winning more adherents or at least stu- 
dents than one would suppose without investiga- 
tion. This is what is now known as Theosophy, 
though it differs widely from some of the an- 
cient applications of that name. It may con- 
tain fundamental truth directly inspired by the 
Divinity. Whether it does or not, is imma- 
terial for present purposes, because Theosophy 



i2 4 A LAYMAN'S APOLOGY 

cannot accurately be described as a religion. 
A Theosophist may be a Buddhist, a Roman 
Catholic, a Quaker. As a highly devout and 
highly intellectual follower of the cult, who is 
at the same time a member in good and regular 
standing of the Congregational church, has 
written: " Theosophy is more a wisdom built 
upon former conceptions than an original first- 
principle religion. It does not teach dogmatic 
theology or hold hard and fast beliefs, except 
that one must believe in and lead the life of 
universal brotherhood to be a Theosophist. I 
have given it much thought and study for 
twenty-five years, and find nothing in it to con- 
flict with Christ's teachings. Most Theoso- 
phists think of the God of Christ as in-dwelling, 
the light within — ' the kingdom of God is 
within you,' and God must dwell in his king- 
dom; but to me this does not conflict with a 
conception of a Great Intelligence, a Compas- 
sionate One who answers prayer and to whom 
it is worth while to appeal." No comparison 
is therefore to be drawn between the supposed 
inspiration of Theosophy and the supposed in- 



CHRISTIANITY 125 

spiration of Christianity, for there is no neces- 
sary conflict between the two. Rather is there, 
in many respects, a striking similarity. The 
inner Theosophical life begins with a change 
much like Christian conversion, the entering 
upon a mystical Path that leads through Gates 
of Gold and beyond them into a region where 
man is on the threshold of becoming more than 
man. This change demands a resolute and 
irrevocable turning of the soul from all sin that 
soils it, toward the pure light of goodness, and 
most especially and above all things from every 
form of selfishness; the pupil must not even 
wish to tread the Path because it will bring 
him to blessedness, but only because it is right 
for him to walk there; and he is earnestly 
warned that he must pass through much mental 
distress before making great progress. Bun- 
yan and the Slough of Despond come instantly 
to mind, here and in the sketchy outlines that 
are given of what will be experienced further 
on. A very great proportion of Theosophical 
doctrine, especially in its practical applications 
to daily life, might be adopted verbatim by 



126 A LAYMAN'S APOLOGY 

any Christian church, and one may well believe 
that it is in some sense divinely inspired, without 
either subscribing to or positively rejecting the 
many features which differentiate it as a sys- 
tem of philosophy from what can properly be 
called a religion. 

It seems therefore to the writer of these 
pages that Christianity is preeminently the re- 
ligion of the world, the only system of religious 
belief for which unqualified and continuous di- 
vine authority can reasonably be claimed. And 
with all that is said to the contrary, its fruits 
thus far gathered appear to him to justify the 
belief that it will ultimately receive universal 
acceptance. These fruits are known of all 
men. Paint the vice of the so-called Christian 
countries as black as you will, it remains true 
that in them are millions of almost ideal homes, 
made so most distinctly by the teachings of 
Christianity, and millions of men and women 
who are honestly endeavoring to lead the sort 
of life that Christianity inculcates. And the 
progress of Christianity toward universal ac- 
ceptance is not really quite as slow as some 



CHRISTIANITY 127 

people would have us believe. About one- 
third of the population of the world may now 
be computed as accepting it or professing, 
though perhaps rather languidly, to accept it; 
and there are said to be seventeen million en- 
rolled Christians in non-christian lands. That 
may not seem a large result after two thousand 
years; but the rate of gain is accelerating. In 
China, it took a century to make the first mil- 
lion converts; twelve years for the second mil- 
lion; less than six years for the third. And 
then, if man has really been on the earth for 
quarter of the immensely long period now al- 
leged by palaeontological science, what is a 
couple of millenniums? 

Two great difficulties in the way of believing 
in the ultimate universality of the acceptance 
of Christianity come, of course, instantly to 
mind — the bewildering diversity of discordant 
sects into which the church is cut up, and the 
apparent loss of general influence by the au- 
thorities of perhaps* all denominations, in re- 
cent years. A distinguished publicist and very 
practical man of affairs, Henry Watterson, said 



128 A LAYMAN'S APOLOGY 

recently in a public address : " The pulpit re- 
mains therefore still the moral hope of the uni- 
verse and the spiritual light of mankind." 
That depends on the meaning that is to be at- 
tached to the word " pulpit." The power of 
the present pulpit, just as now constituted, over 
public opinion and practice in the so-called 
Christian countries, is a mere fraction, we are 
generally told, of what it was; and people do 
not attend worship in anything like the pro- 
portion that prevailed a generation ago; what- 
ever the church may be gaining abroad, it is 
losing more at home in the rapid diminution, 
in the lands in which it has been longest es- 
tablished, of its sway over the thought and 
the lives of men. Personally, I think these 
statements are not without foundation; and it 
appears to me that the regretted change shows 
every sign of being steadily progressive ; novel- 
ties of method in the churches, the introduction 
of popular social features and the like, seem 
to effect little or nothing in the way of check- 
ing it. But it is essential to remember that 
" the church " and " Christianity " are not nee- 



CHRISTIANITY 129 

essarily interconvertible terms; Christianity 
may be immensely strengthened by such a 
transformation of all present church organiza- 
tions as shall amount practically to their utter 
destruction, and the evolution of something en- 
tirely different. Can we not even now per- 
ceive some indications of such an evolutionary 
process? Are not the minds of most thought- 
ful persons preparing for it? Instead of the 
former uncompromising adherence to elaborate 
and rigid creeds down to most unessential par- 
ticulars, it seems to me that a very hopeful 
proportion of religious people are coming more 
and more to separate the articles of their faith, 
almost unconsciously perhaps, but still effect- 
ively, into four classes. They recognize, first, 
that a great many questions formerly the sub- 
ject of heated debate can never be definitely 
settled, and are of about as much importance 
as the tints in the coat that Jacob gave to 
Joseph; you don't know what they were, you 
can't find out, and nobody need care. Then 
secondly, there are many tenets, not quite so 
trifling but certainly not vital, about which they 



i 3 o A LAYMAN'S APOLOGY 

hold their judgment in suspense; they have 
never decided on them, and they let them rest 
until perhaps they shall see more light, 
Thirdly, there are points of doctrine that ap- 
pear to them to be clear, but about which they 
see no necessity of discussion, realizing that 
other people, just as good Christians as them- 
selves, may view them very differently, and not 
without some reason ; such for instance are sev- 
eral of the doctrines referred to in the chapter 
immediately preceding this, doctrines that seem 
to millions of thoughtful people to be securely 
established, but about which they have no quar- 
rel with any one who rejects them. The irre- 
ducible minimum that remains, the creed that 
must be accepted if one believes in any form 
of Christianity, is far smaller, surely, than for- 
merly it was thought to be, leaving a neutral 
zone that gives common ground for far greater 
variety of opinion than it would have been sup- 
posed able to accommodate, a century ago. 
Let it be noted that the broader modern view 
is distinctly scientific, being precisely the view 
that real students of physical science always 



CHRISTIANITY 131 

take in their specialties. There are many 
trifling possibilities about which they do not 
concern themselves at all; many suppositions 
about which they have not reached final de- 
cision; many that they think are well estab- 
lished but would by no means cling to perti- 
naciously should real objection be brought up; 
many that they regard as so positively settled 
that if anybody doubts them he only displays 
ignorance. The adoption, in the highest of all 
the sciences, of a mental attitude long recog- 
nized as necessary to real progress in investigat- 
ing the phenomena of physical matter and force, 
is a most promising augury, it seems to me, 
for final agreement on the essentials, very 
nearly as peaceful as that which prevails con- 
cerning the operation of gravitation or the ro- 
tation of the planets. 

This great gain in our habits of thought is 
manifesting itself in the perfectly patent fact 
that the division lines between the different cate- 
gories of religious belief are far less rigidly 
drawn than formerly. Roman Catholics no 
longer class all " heretics " with atheists and 



132 A LAYMAN'S APOLOGY 

the heathen; members of the so-called " Evan- 
gelical " communions no longer regard, on the 
one side, all Romanists as idolaters or, on the 
other side, all Unitarians as awful blasphemers, 
sure of final damnation; Unitarians fraternize 
in many ways with Trinitarians on one hand 
and with Jews on the other. Three very im- 
portant denominations in Canada — the Pres- 
byterian, the Congregational and the Metho- 
dist — which differ widely in their plans of 
organization and polity, as well as in many 
points of doctrine formerly regarded as of al- 
most vital importance, have not only abolished 
the divisions which cut up each of them (as 
they are still cut up in the United States) into 
a number of sub-denominations, but have defi- 
nitely agreed to merge all the three great 
churches into a single organic body standing 
for the essentials on which all agree, and waiv- 
ing insistence on the minor points formerly too 
much emphasized by each of them. There has 
been organized also in the Anglican church 
of the Dominion a " Church Unity League " 
the members of which disavow the notion, still 



CHRISTIANITY 133 

generally held in the Episcopal communion 
everywhere, that only ordination by an Episco- 
pal bishop can really make a man a Prot- 
estant clergyman. The alarm at this tend- 
ency not infrequently displayed by sectarian 
teachers of the extreme type, who iden- 
tify with religion the peculiar tenets of their 
special faith, and look upon the threatened 
modification of the latter as equivalent to the 
destruction of the former, — this very display 
of alarm indicates the increasing strength of 
the movement toward some sort of unity, vague 
as are at present our efforts to feel after it and 
find it. There are dark clouds on the horizon? 
Yes; is there not also dawn, the promise of 
day? The necessity of far-reaching re-ar- 
rangement is not of itself alarming. It is 
hardly to be conceived as possible that any 
changes in the future in the organization and 
the forms of worship called Christian can mark 
differences with the present status wider than 
the differences that now prevail between say the 
Roman Church and the Society of Friends ; and 
if Christianity can endure such striking varia- 



134 A LAYMAN'S APOLOGY 

tions contemporaneously, it does not appear 
that her vitality will be threatened by differences 
of no greater importance coming in succession. 
Do not the established facts of history and the 
Zeitgeist of the present day suggest strongly 
the gradual development of a distinctly Chris- 
tian brotherhood that shall more and more per- 
ceive and propagate to universal dominion 
among mankind the great principles on which 
all churches rest, and more and more free itself 
of every impediment in the way of man-made 
additions to the Christianity of Christ? 

We have far fewer, or at any rate far less 
vociferous, professional infidels now than for- 
merly; and the positive atheist, seizing every 
occasion to propagate his views, seems to have 
become an almost extinct species. Still, there 
are some of both classes left; and to them may 
perhaps be commended not inappropriately the 
admonition of Gamaliel: "Refrain; if this 
counsel or this work be of men, it will come to 
naught; if it be of God, ye cannot overthrow 
it; lest haply ye be found even to fight against 
God." 



OCT 1 1 1913 



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